Journal of Germanic Linguistics 19.2 (2007):115–160
Semantic Structure of the German Spatial Particle über Olga Liamkina Georgetown University This paper analyzes the semantic structure of the German spatial particle über based on the principles of Cognitive Linguistics. By applying the Polysemy Network Model (Tyler and Evans 2003), thirteen distinct senses of über are identified and conceptual connections between them are elucidated. Furthermore, the semantic structure of English over (the closest counterpart of über) established by Tyler and Evans is expanded, and additional criteria for determining the primary and other distinct senses are proposed. Finally, the network of senses for über is applied to its functions as a separable or inseparable prefix in an attempt to provide insights into the issues of prefix (in)separability in German and to account for the meaning of über in a unified manner.
1. Introduction. Several approaches, such as homonyny, monosemy, and polysemy have been developed in the past to account for the existence of multiple distinct meanings associated with one lexical form. Within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, the polysemy approach receives support from many studies of spatial particles in English and other languages (Bellavia 1996; Brugman 1981; Dewell 1994, 1996; Kreitzer 1997; Lakoff 1987; Sandra and Rice 1995; Taylor 1986; Vandeloise 1991, 1994).1 Most of the work concerning spatial particles is based on the pioneering contributions of Brugman (1981) and Lakoff (1987), who adapted Brugman’s treatment of the spatial particle over. The most recent, and one of the most comprehensive treatments of English spatial particles to date, is presented in Tyler and Evans 2003 (for a succinct summary of the analysis of over, see Tyler and Evans 2001). Advocating 1
I use spatial particle since it is the broadest term and subsumes such categories as preposition, verbal prefix (separable or inseparable), nominal prefix, adprep, and part of a compound preposition (such as hinüber). © Society for Germanic Linguistics
116 Liamkina the approach of PRINCIPLED POLYSEMY, Tyler and Evans offer a methodology for identifying the distinct senses of particles designed to overcome the shortcomings of previous accounts, which rely heavily on researchers’ intuitions—rather than on principled ways of distinguishing senses—and fail to demonstrate how the new senses arise from the established ones within an integrated polysemy network. The authors apply their methodology to the analysis of the semantic networks of fifteen English spatial particles, giving an especially detailed treatment of over. The purpose of this paper is fourfold. Primarily, it sets out to test Tyler and Evans’s methodology on the German particle über (the closest counterpart of the much studied over) in order to see whether it is applicable to the investigation of other languages. Since Tyler and Evans rely on general principles of Cognitive Linguistics, such as profiling and topological extension, if their analysis is accurate we would expect the model to apply generally to other languages and possibly to be adaptable for the purposes of establishing polysemy networks of not only particles, but of other functional categories as well (for example, modal verbs). The second purpose of this paper runs parallel to the task of testing the methodology, namely, establishing a network of senses for über. Thirdly, this paper attempts to provide insights into the thorny issue of (in)separability of German particles when combined with verbs—an issue I believe to be inherently connected with the semantic structure of the particles. Finally, through the analysis of über, I augment the semantic structure of over established by Tyler and Evans. 2. The Principled Polysemy Approach. Lakoff’s (1987) “full-specification” approach to the creation of the semantic network for spatial particles has been criticized in the literature for mainly two reasons (see Dewell 1994; Kreitzer 1997; Sandra and Rice 1995). First, by attempting to build too much redundancy into the semantic representation, his model provides an unconstrained semantic network with a vast number of distinct senses, which disregards the role of sentential context and background knowledge. Second, Lakoff does not provide a methodology for identification of the senses, relying primarily on his intuition. Kreitzer (1997), in particular, attempts to constrain Lakoff’s analysis by organizing the multitude of senses postulated by Lakoff under three image-schemas in which over
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represents a static, dynamic, or occluding sense. However, he does not offer an explanation as to how these three image-schemas are related to each other and relies too heavily on the ability of a formal linguistic expression to carry a rich fully-specified meaning, ignoring the fundamental human ability to draw on contextual clues and general background knowledge in interpreting linguistic input. To overcome the deficiencies of both Lakoff’s and Kreitzer’s models, Tyler and Evans (2001:731–733; 2003) propose a methodology based on what the authors term “principled polysemy,” which means that a particular form, such as the spatial particle over, is associated with a number of distinct but related senses derived from a primary spatial sense in systematic and motivated ways. Central to the model developed by Tyler and Evans is the role of real-world knowledge and inferencing strategies (such as best fit, real-world force dynamics, and topological extensions) in interpreting linguistically underspecified clues. The authors point to a difference between meanings constructed on-line with the help of contextual cues and senses that are instantiated in memory. This important differentiation helps limit the number of senses that are part of a semantic network of a particle and demonstrates that—at least for over—there are not as many senses as Lakoff claimed. In explaining how new senses are derived from a primary spatial sense (or the PROTOSCENE), the authors appeal to two types of processes: experiential correlation (Grady 1997) and change of a vantage point, both of which are supported by a mechanism called PRAGMATIC STRENGTHENING or conventionalization of implicatures resulting from continued usage and ultimate entrenchment of usage patterns (Traugott 1989). Grady suggests that recurring correlations in our everyday experiences create conceptual associations between otherwise unrelated concepts. For instance, we recurrently observe increase in quantity manifested in vertical elevation, which gives rise to the entrenched metaphor “more is up” (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980), manifested in such sentences as The prices have gone up. This experiential correlation also gives rise to the “more” sense of over (for example, Over [= more than] five hundred people came to the concert). Once a sense is instantiated in memory as part of a semantic network, it can be employed to mediate relationships between non-physical entities—relationships that are functional rather than purely spatial.
118 Liamkina Another process by which a new sense can emerge rests on what Langacker (1987) calls PROFILING. Profiling is defined as giving special prominence to only a part of a semantic structure, called the “base,” or, put in a less technical way, focusing on an element of a scene. Langacker claims that the same scene can be construed in different ways, but changes in construal will result in shifts in meaning (and often in changes in the linguistic realization of this construal). Tyler and Evans argue, for instance, that in a spatial scene in which the trajector (TR) is higher than the landmark (LM), a shift of perspective from off-stage to the speaker’s viewpoint will result in a new sense of over, namely “on-the-other-sideof,” as in Arlington is over the Potomac River from Georgetown (2001:747).2 From a recurrent change in vantage point or experiential correlation, the speakers come to associate a particular linguistic form with the implicature results—the process known as pragmatic strengthening (Traugott 1989). Based on the above mechanisms, Tyler and Evans suggest that for a particle meaning to count as a distinct sense in a polysemy network, it must satisfy two conditions. First, a sense must contain additional meaning not apparent in any other senses associated with this particle. Second, “there must be instances of the sense that are context-independent, instances in which the distinct sense could not be inferred from another sense and the context in which it occurs” (2001:731–732). Applying these two criteria, the authors found fourteen distinct senses for the spatial particle over; they also proposed five criteria for identifying the primary sense, or the protoscene (see below). In the semantic network for over, several clusters of distinct senses are derived from the reanalysis of the prototypical scene. In some cases a distinct conventionalized sense arises from another distinct sense, rather than directly from the protoscene. Below is a list of the distinct senses associated with over (Tyler and Evans 2001:746):
2
The difference between “trajector” and “landmark” exemplifies a general cognitive phenomenon of figure-ground organization and has to do with a relative prominence of one entity (TR) vis-à-vis another (LM). Within a conceptualization of a relation, a TR is singled out as the primary focus of attention, whereas an LM has secondary focus.
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1. Protoscene 2. ABC trajectory cluster: 2A. On-the-other-side-of sense 2B. Above-and-beyond (excess I) sense 2C. Completion sense 2D. Transfer sense 3. Covering sense 4. Examining sense 4A. Focus-of-attention sense 5. Up cluster: 5A. More sense 5A1. Over-and-above (excess II) sense 5B. Control sense 5C. Preference sense 6. Reflexive sense 6A. Repetition sense 3. Principled Polysemy and a Semantic Network of über. German-German dictionaries (Wahrig 1994, Duden 2001) and grammars (for example, Schmitz 1961, Schröder 1986) usually give lists of different usages and meanings of spatial particles. However, the variability of those lists indicates that there are no set criteria that could be applied to identify the distinct senses of each particle. To the best of my knowledge, there are only two accounts of German über from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective that attempt to explain the semantic structure of über, rather than simply listing its uses the way traditional treatments tend to do. Concerned primarily with the issue of (in)separability of particles as verbal prefixes, Dewell (1996) investigates the range of senses that appear in prepositional and prefixal uses of über. Following Lakoff and Brugman’s analyses of over, he assumes that über is primarily a path preposition—but with an arc trajectory rather than a flat “across” one. Bellavia (1996) investigates the meaning of über across the three domains of its use: as a preposition and as a verbal prefix, separable and inseparable. Basing her analysis on the examples from the Wahrig 1978 and Duden 1981 dictionaries, she proposes a network of eight schemas that represent various spatial configurations inherent in this particle (p. 105):
120 Liamkina 1. TR above the LM, -motion 2. TR above the LM, +motion 3. TR above the LM, crossing LM’s boundaries along the horizontal dimension, -contact 4. TR crossing LM’s boundaries along the horizontal dimension, +contact 5. motionless TR at the endpoint of a path represented by schema 4 6. TR moves along an arc trajectory beyond LM obstacle (+/-contact) 7. TR crosses the LM’s boundary along the vertical dimension (where LM is conceptualized as a container) 8. TR entirely covers the LM. She further applies these spatial schemas to what are called “extended” or metaphorical meanings of über (p. 83), which cover control, excess, time, and beyond metaphors. Again, the weakness of Bellavia’s treatment of über is the lack of a consistent approach to establishing the schemas, without which she runs the same risk as Lakoff in positing too many or too few meanings that speakers associate with über (why, for instance, is the “+/-contact” feature irrelevant for schema 6, whereas it is the only feature that distinguishes schemas 3 and 4?). Moreover, although Bellavia offers a network of schemas connected to each other, she does not explain the mechanisms behind these connections or the schemas’ connections with the “extended” meanings; nor does she offer any argumentation as to why the ARC schema represents the central meaning of über. Bellavia’s and Dewell’s treatments of separable and inseparable prefixes is discussed in more detail below. As in the investigations of the semantic structure of über mentioned above, my examples and their interpretations stem from what is available in German-German dictionaries (Wahrig, Duden, Langenscheidt 2003), and additionally from grammars (Schmitz 1961; Helbig and Buscha 1970; Schröder 1986), a novel (Richter 2001), and insights of adult college-educated native speakers who were interviewed for this study.3 3
The following methodology was used. First, I asked two college-educated native speakers (NS) of German to translate into German all sentences with the particle over from Tyler and Evans (2001) in order to establish a basis for comparison between over and über. The NSs were instructed to use the particle über in their translations where possible (as a preposition, adprep, or a verbal
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Where appropriate, I use Tyler and Evans’s terminology for labeling the senses, for the purposes of comparability of the semantic networks of over and über. Due to space constraints, I only briefly summarize Tyler and Evans’s analyses of the following senses of over, much of which is also applicable to über: the protoscene and “covering,” “over-andabove,” and “control” senses. Figure 1, a preview of the remainder of this paper, represents the proposed semantic network of über, which subsumes 13 distinct senses. In accordance with Tyler and Evans’s signs, the primary sense is denoted by a large shaded circle in the middle, distinct senses by smaller shaded circles, and clusters of senses by an open circle. The dotted line between senses 4 and 2E1 indicates the alternate route for the “causality” sense discussed below.
prefix). During interviews, they explained why they could not translate some of the expressions with over into German using über and elaborated on the anomalous readings of the sentences one would get if one were to use über with them (for example, see 10b below). Then, I augmented the list of translated sentences with sentences that represented additional shades of meaning for über, which came from the German-German dictionaries and from the grammars mentioned above. In one-on-one interviews, I asked five additional NSs to judge each sentence on its acceptability and briefly elaborate on a context in which each sentence can be used. All NSs were young college-educated adults (between 25 and 34 years old) from different parts of Germany, who had been living in the United States between one and eight years. Subsequently, I enlarged the database of sentences for this analysis even further by adding to it all instances of über found in the first five chapters of a contemporary German novel (Richter 2001). While these instances constituted naturally occurring uses of the particle (in contrast to presumably artificially constructed sentences in dictionaries and grammars) and while the novel provided rich context for interpreting their meanings, I did not include these sentences in this paper, mainly due to their length.
122 Liamkina 2E1 2C
2D
2B
2E
2A
2
3 4 1 5
5A 5C 5B 5A1 Figure 1. Semantic network of über. 3.1. The Primary Sense (1). The polysemy network approach presupposes that the prepositions are organized around a primary sense (protoscene), which is stored in the memory as an abstracted representation of the spatial scenes we encounter in the real world (for an overview of a polysemy approach within Cognitive Linguistics, see Smith 2005). Tyler and Evans offer five criteria for determining which sense should be considered a primary one: diachronic evidence, predominance in the network (the unique spatial configuration that is involved in the majority of distinct senses in the network), use in composite forms, relations to other spatial particles, and grammatical predictions. In this section, I apply these criteria to über in order to determine which sense is primary, that is, which sense gave rise to other senses in the semantic network.
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Brugman’s (1981) and Lakoff’s (1987) work has established a tradition among cognitive linguists to see over primarily as a path preposition (Dewell 1994; Taylor 1986), disagreeing only regarding the shape of this path: a curved arc-trajectory or a flat “across” one. As I mentioned above, in their analysis of über, the closest counterpart of over in German, Bellavia (1996) and Dewell (1996) similarly argue that the basic meaning of über is a spatial scene in which a TR is—at some point of its path—higher than the LM. In contrast, Kreitzer (1997) asserts that the primary spatial scene for over is a non-path, static image (represented in the sentence, The hummingbird hovered over the flower), the secondary sense being a linear trajectory (as in The bridge stretches over the river). However, regardless of the shape of the trajectory, these analyses presuppose that spatial prepositions profile dynamic temporal relations between TR and LM, which contradicts Langacker’s (1992:292) assertion that spatial particles profile atemporal relationships (the ones that do not evolve over time but rather are scanned in summary fashion). Both Kreitzer (1997) and Tyler and Evans (2001:742) argue that a path component that presupposes movement is coded by the verb rather than by the particle over, and that the representation of a particular trajectory is not stored in the semantic network of either the verb or particle, but comes from our knowledge of the world, in general, and force dynamics, in particular. Wunderlich (1983) makes the same argument for über. In fact, if we compare the two uses of über in 1, the spatial configuration remains the same (TR is higher than the LM), and the understanding of the dynamism in 1a comes from the verb. (1) a. Der Hubschrauber schwebte über dem Gebäude. the helicopter hovered over the building ‘The helicopter hovered over the building.’ b. Das Bild hängt über dem Sofa. the picture hangs over the sofa ‘The picture hangs over the sofa.’ Therefore, the primary spatial scene (or the protoscene) for the particle über does not include path (see figure 2).
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_____________ Figure 2. Protoscene. Determining which schema represents a central meaning for über— an across trajectory, an arc trajectory (which presumably both subsume a static “higher than the LM” configuration), or a static configuration as represented above—is ultimately an empirical question. Evidence from future studies in child L1 acquisition and in psycholinguistics may lend evidence in support of one theory or another, but for the remainder of this paper I assume that the primary sense for über represents a static locational configuration. One of Tyler and Evans’s criteria for establishing a primary sense also lends support to this assumption: the “compositional sets” criterion postulates that particles divide the space in particular ways and partially co-determine each other’s meaning. The compositional set that divides vertical dimension in German includes über and unter, and the sense that distinguishes über from unter is that the TR is located higher than the LM (as opposed to “lower-than-the-LM”). It is hard to imagine that anyone would argue that the primary spatial schema for unter is an inverted arc trajectory. In fact, it is impossible to juxtapose the TR’s movement along the arc trajectory above (for über) with below (for unter) the LM (see 2). At the same time, however, it is entirely possible to juxtapose the static “higher-than-the-LM” sense of über with the static “lower-than-the-LM” sense of unter when the entire action—being or flying—takes place at a static location above or below a specified LM (see 3 and 4). (2) a. Er kriecht über die Mauer und läuft weiter. he crawls over the wall and runs further ‘He crawls over the wall and keeps running.’ b. *Er kriecht unter die Mauer und läuft weiter. he crawls under the wall and runs further ‘He crawls under the wall and keeps running.’
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(3) a. Das Bild ist über dem Sofa. the picture is over the sofa ‘The picture is over the sofa.’ b. Das Bild ist unter dem Sofa. the picture is under the sofa ‘The picture is under the sofa.’ (4) a. Das Flugzeug fliegt über den Wolken. the plane is-flying over the clouds ‘The plane is flying over/above the clouds.’ b. Das Flugzeug fliegt unter den Wolken. the plane is-flying under the clouds ‘The plane is flying under/below the clouds.’ The other four criteria also point to the “higher-than-the-LM” sense as being the primary one. I review them in turn. (i) Earliest attested meaning. According to a German etymological dictionary (Pfeifer 1989), the formation of über can be traced as far back as the Indo-European form +uper(i), which meant above and described a spatial scene where the TR is higher than the LM. (ii) Predominance in the semantic network. The reader can see from the analysis below that the majority of senses for über are derived directly from the “higher-than-the-LM” sense and involve a spatial configuration in which the TR is higher than the LM (“higher-than-the-LM,” “focus-of-attention,” “covering” senses, as well as the Up cluster). (iii) Use in composite forms. Tyler and Evans suggest that participation in composite forms cannot directly determine the primary sense, but the failure to participate will exclude the sense from being considered as a primary sense. As demonstrated below, the analysis of the use of über as a verbal prefix shows that the higher-than-the-LM sense is relatively productive in coining new word forms. (iv) Grammatical predictions. This criterion postulates that a number of senses should be directly derivable from the primary sense or, if derived from another sense, that other sense should be traceable to the
126 Liamkina primary one. It will be evident in my analysis (and is graphically represented in Figure 1) that the higher-than-the-LM sense has given rise to two clusters of senses, as well as to several distinct separate senses. There is no way, for example, to connect the “covering” sense with a “better” sense without going through the “higher-than-the-LM” sense. There is an important caveat regarding the application of criteria i and ii above. Predominance of a certain sense in the semantic network does not guarantee in and of itself that this sense is the most frequently used one in the current spoken and written language. Only a systematic corpus-based analysis can reveal which sense or senses come out as the predominant one(s) in language patterns and which ones are used only sporadically and/or in highly marked or restricted contexts. Accordingly, frequency of occurrence may be considered a sixth criterion for establishing a primary sense. However, the results of its application may potentially contradict the results of the “earliest attested meaning” criterion, since over the course of a particle’s use, the scope of its original meaning may shift significantly and no longer play an important role in the current usage or may even be completely bleached out in the process of grammaticalization. In case of contradicting results, deciding which of the two criteria is more important becomes ultimately a question of deciding how much weight should be attributed to the diachronic versus synchronic evidence in determining the particle’s primary sense and whether diachronic evidence is relevant for the current shape of a semantic network. 3.2. ABC Trajectory Cluster. What in previous analyses of über was described as various instantiations of an arc-trajectory appears instead to be representative of several distinct senses of über arising from reconceptualization of a recurrent scenario in which a TR starts out on one side of the LM and ends up on another, as captured by sentences such as 5 and represented in figure 3. (5) Das Pferd ist über den Zaun gesprungen. the horse is over the fence jumped ‘The horse (has) jumped over the fence.’
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B
A
C
Figure 3. ABC trajectory. Senses belonging to the ABC trajectory cluster profile a sequentially evolving process that is conceptualized in a summary format: what sets the senses apart is the change of viewing point as well as change of focus or, to use Tyler and Evans’s terminology, change in the highlighted elements, which together yield different construals of the scene represented in figure 3. For example, we see below that in the “on-the-otherside-of” sense, point C is highlighted but the viewing point is at point A, whereas in the “via” sense the viewing point is off-stage and the entire trajectory is highlighted. In addition to changes in spatial construals, each sense invokes a different functional relationship between the TR and the LM (for example, going beyond a target in the “above-and-beyond” or LM serving as a medium for TR in the “medium” sense) associated with conventionalized implicatures that result from changing the vantage point. The ABC trajectory cluster consists of six distinct senses, each of which I examine in the sections below. 3.3. On-the-Other-Side-of Sense (2A). If we assume that the primary sense for über is a static “TR-is-higherthan-the-LM” configuration and that the idea of motion along the path comes from the verb, how then do we come to understand the sentence in 6 to mean that the TR (“dog”) is dead? I would argue that this understanding comes from the “on-the-other-side-of” sense of über. (6) Der Hund ist hinüber. the dog is DIRECTIONAL PARTICLE+over ‘The dog is dead.’ The first criterion for establishing a separate sense postulates that the spatial configuration between TR and LM has to be different from the
128 Liamkina one in other senses. Changing vantage point on a spatial scene can give rise to different construals and consequently to different senses. Tyler and Evans argue that the default off-stage vantage point in the primary sense shifts to the speaker’s vantage point to produce the “on-the-otherside-of” sense. Consider the examples in 7, where this is clearly the case. (7) a. Er wohnt über der Straße. he lives over the street ‘He lives over the street.’ b. Er wohnt gegenüber (von uns). he lives against+over (from us) ‘He lives across (from us).’ Not only the vantage point has changed, but there is also no motion verb in the above examples to prompt for a trajectory. Instead, über designates a spatial configuration in which the motion is complete and the TR is located on the other side of the LM, relative to the starting point of the trajectory. Thus, two criteria for establishing a sense are satisfied. There are, however, some caveats. The Duden dictionary and Schröder’s (1986:174) grammar describe the use of über in 7a as obsolete or colloquial, and the sentence was either completely unacceptable or at least somewhat odd to the young native speakers I talked to (although 7b was acceptable).4 Interestingly, one of the native speakers mentioned that the expression über den Bergen leben ‘live over the mountains’ sounds acceptable to her, but probably because it is a highly stylized expression that comes up in fairy tales to indicate “far away” (über den Bergen, im Land der Zwergen ‘over the mountains, in the land of dwarves’). It might be possible that this sense of über in static spatial scenes is gradually becoming obsolete and is being retained only in very specific contexts or in expressions with figurative meaning, as in 6 above. When someone dies, we often figuratively portray this event as 4
Only one of seven NSs found the sentence Er wohnt gegenüber von uns unacceptable, although she considered it to be fine without “von uns.” Instead, she offered an alternative: Er wohnt uns gegenüber, which other NSs in their turn found unacceptable. This discrepancy may have to do with the fact that this particular NS has spent the most time (eight years) in the United States.
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stepping over some sort of a boundary between life and death, the dead person being “on the other side.” This highly abstract conceptualization prompts the use of über (and over in English, such as in crossing over and other death-related expressions). Because this abstract boundary is recoverable from the given context (death situation), it is often not mentioned, resulting in what Dewell calls “gapped LM” (1996:112). Therefore, in 6 there is no explicit LM, but we are still able to interpret it as the dog ending up on the other side of a trajectory that leads away from the speaker’s point of view (indicated by particle hin-)—that is, being dead. There are many more instantiations of the “on-the-other-side-of” sense of über involving overt LMs and motion verbs, as in 8. (8) Das Flugzeug flog über den Ozean. The plane flew over the ocean-ACC ‘The plane flew over the ocean.’ [… and made it to the other side or crossed the ocean’s boundary] In English, such cases present a clear picture: the understanding of motion comes from the verb, the shape of the trajectory from our knowledge of the world and real world force dynamics, and the “on-theother-side-of” sense of over contributes to our interpretation that the TR (plane) made it to the other side of the ocean—in the absence of any information to the contrary. In German, however, the picture is complicated by the contribution made by the grammatical case of the LM—a situation that reveals an intricate “co-operation” between lexical (particle meaning) and category (case) semantics. At first glance—and this is the way the conventional wisdom goes—sentences 8 and 9 differ only in the case assigned to the LM, namely accusative or dative. German language students are often taught that when one wants to indicate that the TR crosses a boundary of a LM, one needs to use accusative; when it does not, then dative is to be used. From this, a misperception might arise that the meaning of “on-the-other-side-of” (as a consequence of crossing of a boundary) comes from the use of accusative case, and not from über.
130 Liamkina (9) Das Flugzeug flog über dem Ozean. The plane flew over/above the ocean-DAT ‘The plane flew over/above the ocean.’ [the intent of crossing the ocean’s boundary is not specified; we do not know whether the plane crossed it or not] Smith (1987), in his comprehensive inquiry into case semantics from a cognitive perspective, convincingly argues that in the prepositional domain the meaning of accusative is a changed relationship between TR and LM, which for spatial prepositions means a change in spatial configuration that holds between TR and LM. By contrast, dative signals that no such change has occurred. Crossing a boundary by definition means such change in a spatial configuration between TR and LM, therefore it has been associated with the use of accusative. I conclude that the two meanings being contributed by accusative case and by über, respectively, are “change in configuration by crossing a boundary” and “on-the-other-side-of-a-LM,” whereby über specifies in which particular fashion the TR and LM changed their configuration: namely, that TR left the LM completely behind (as opposed, for instance, to the preposition in in combination with accusative, which indicates that TR was outside of a container-like LM and, as a result of a change, is now inside the LM). We see that the use of accusative case is compatible with this sense, whereas the semantics of the dative often clashes with the “on-the-otherside-of” sense of über and, in fact, may not instantiate it. Consider the examples in 10. (10) a. Er he
ging went
über die Straße. over the street-ACC
‘He went across the street.’ b. ?Er ging he went
über der Straße. over the street-DAT
‘He went above the street.’ While there is no problem interpreting 10a in the same way as 8, in order for the sentence in 10b to be somewhat comprehensible we must
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think of a ghostly apparition. Since there is no accusative case in 10b to support the “on-the-other-side-of” sense of über, we revert to this particle’s primary sense, namely “TR-is-higher-than-the-LM” with no contact between them, which is supported by the use of dative. In a similar construction in 9, our knowledge of the real world and the fact that planes can move through air without contact with a LM allows us to arrive at an acceptable interpretation. The same real world knowledge that humans cannot walk suspended in the air leaves us the only option of interpreting 10b as referring to a ghostly presence capable of defying gravity and walking without contact with the LM.5 Example 10b also highlights an important aspect of the über’s primary sense, namely that there is no contact between TR and LM (although the lack of contact is not a necessary part of other senses of 5
It is interesting that when the TR and LM are in immediate contact with each other, the meaning of the English particle across is also subsumed by the “onthe-other-side-of” sense of German über. Talmy (1983) describes “across schema” as “(motion along the whole length of) a horizontal path-line that runs perpendicularly from one edge to the other of a planar object bounded by two opposite parallel edges, where this plane is not ‘laterally collapsible’” (p. 259). While the motion is coded by the verb, the sense of crossing a border while in contact with a flat planar LM comes from across, but apparently this notion is not represented in German either by a separate particle or by a distinct sense of über. Consider the sentences in i and ii. (i) Er schwamm über die See. he swam over the sea-ACC ‘He swam across the sea.’ [contact with the LM while crossing its boundary] (ii) Er sprang über den Graben. he jumped over the ditch-ACC ‘He jumped over the ditch.’ [no contact with the LM while crossing its boundary] In both cases, the major spatial configuration remains the same: the TR is on the other side of the LM. It is from the sentential context that we understand that the TR was in contact with the LM: it is a necessary condition for the verb “to swim” to remain in contact with the LM, and a necessary condition of “to jump” to be out of contact with the LM, at least for some time. Therefore, the use of über in the first sentence fails the test for establishing a distinct sense.
132 Liamkina über, some of which actually arose because the “lack of contact” condition was suspended). If native speakers want to describe a spatial scene in which a TR moves or is situated higher than the LM and which in every other way is identical to the protoscene for über—except for the presence of contact between TR and LM—they would choose the particle auf. The TR (he) in example 11 is in contact with the LM (street) and, most importantly, there is no sense of the TR getting to the other side of the LM—otherwise the use of über would be necessary. (11) Er ging auf der Straße. he went on the street-DAT ‘He went on/along the street.’ 3.4. Medium Sense (2B). This sense is invoked particularly often when the transmission of information is involved. The ABC trajectory is reanalyzed to focus the attention on its end point C, and is conceived of as follows: there is an implied transmitter at point A, who sends the information (TR), and there is a receiver at point C. The vantage point shifts from being “off-stage” to point C, or the end point of a trajectory. The LM is conceptualized as the medium that enables the movement of the TR along the trajectory from point A to point C, thus yielding a new functional relationship between the TR and the LM (see sentences in 12). Because of their prominent roles in this functional relationship, such LMs of über are never gapped, as opposed to some highly abstract gapped LMs in the “on-the-other-side-of” sense. (12) a. Ich habe davon über den Rundfunk erfahren. I have it+about over the radio found-out ‘I found out about it through/over the radio.’ b. Über Mikrophon klingt deine Stimme ganz anders. Over microphone sounds your voice completely different ‘Your voice sounds completely different over the microphone.’ The “medium” sense of über is consistent with the communication metaphor entrenched in many languages. It indicates that people concep-
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tualize communication as transmission of information via a certain medium. Bellavia (1996:99) rightly observes that the expression eine Anfrage über Fernschreiber übermitteln (‘to send an inquiry by telex’) is possible—and not redundant—because the two structures utilizing particle über (the prepositional phrase and the inseparable verb) focus on two different aspects of this metaphor. She suggests that the prepositional phrase introduces the medium, while the verb highlights “the action of crossing the transmitted object” (emphasis in the original). I would also argue that the two structures invoke different senses of über: the prepositional phrase invokes the “medium” sense, whereas the verb invokes the “on-the-other-side-of” sense (with a gapped LM). From the English translations of the sentences in 12, it is evident that the “medium” sense is also part of a semantic network for the English over, although Tyler and Evans do not mention this sense in their analysis. However, this sense is inherent to both particles because the verbs erfahren/find out and klingen/sound fail to indicate either sense of motion or sense of transfer, and hence there is no principled way of deriving trajectory and medium readings from the sentential context. This conclusion, combined with a new distinct non-spatial relationship between the TR and LM discussed above, satisfies Tyler and Evans’s two criteria for establishing a separate sense; therefore, we can extend the semantic network of over to include the “medium” sense as part of the “ABC trajectory” cluster. It is worth pointing out here that once a sense is instantiated as distinct within the semantic network, it can be employed to mediate relationships between non-physical (abstract) TRs and LMs, as attested in the sentences in 12. Below we also see this phenomenon at work when we discuss temporal, causality, and other senses of über. 3.5. Above-and-Beyond (Excess I) Sense (2C). Without replicating Tyler and Evans’s argument for “above-and-beyond” being a separate sense, which is applicable both to over and über, I note here that this sense of über includes two additional implicatures: that the LM serves as an intended target (rather than an obstacle) and that the TR moves beyond it, which is often reconceptualized as going too far or involving too much, as in 13a. This is one of several senses of the particle that gives rise to the use of über in composite forms, especially verbs, as in 13b,c.
134 Liamkina (13) a. Er lief einige Meter über das Ziel hinaus. he ran several meters over the target DIRECTIONAL PARTICLE+out ‘He ran several meters beyond the target.’ b. Der Artikel überschreitet die vorgeschriebene Seitenlimit. the article over+goes the prescribed page+limit ‘The article goes over the prescribed page limit.’ c. Er überbelichtete den Film. he overexposed the film ‘He overexposed the film.’ 3.6. “Via” Sense (2D). Another reanalysis of the ABC trajectory is represented by the “via” sense, as in the sentences in 14. (14) a. Mit dem Zug kann man von Erfurt nach Berlin with the train can one from Erfurt to Berlin über Leipzig fahren. over Leipzig travel ‘One can travel by train from Erfurt to Berlin via Leipzig.’ b. Wir fliegen über Frankfurt. we fly over Frankfurt ‘We fly via Frankfurt.’ ‘We are flying over Frankfurt.’ The difference between the “via” sense and the rest of the trajectory cluster is that the “via” sense profiles the entire trajectory (not only its end point), the vantage point is still off-stage, and the TR comes into contact with the LM at the mid point B (see figure 4). This change in profiling not only adds crucial prominence to point B, but also shifts our attention to it from the trajectory’s endpoint C (which may even be explicitly omitted from a sentence). This spatial configuration is especially apparent in sentence 14b, where the plane actually touches ground at the mid-point B of the journey (Frankfurt). The presence of a new
135
Semantic Structure of über
configuration not evident in other senses of the ABC trajectory cluster satisfies the first criterion for establishing a separate sense, reviewed in section 2. Additional evidence, as Tyler and Evans argue, for the existence of a distinct sense is if a sentence is ambiguous because the immediate sentential context does not rule out one of the two senses that are competing in the interpretation (Tyler and Evans’s second criterion). If we consider sentence 14b, we can obtain two readings: (a) we fly via Frankfurt (make a stop there and change planes), or (b) we physically fly above Frankfurt at the moment of speech (as, for instance, a pilot might inform the passengers on the plane).
A
____ ____ B
C
Figure 4. Via sense. 3.7. Temporal Sense (2E). Several predominantly spatial particles in English and German consistently give rise to temporal senses (for example, English: in, for, through, around; German: in, für, durch, gegen, am, um). Über also falls into this category. It is very common for different languages to conceptualize time in terms of motion and three dimensional space (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). German speakers do that in various ways (as attested by the above list of particles with a spatial sense), one of them being an ABC trajectory with the events located on it at different points. Sentence 15a is ambiguous: in one conceptualization, only the end of the trajectory—the end of a time period—constitutes the focus of attention of the speaker, whereas the vantage point is located at point A, at the moment of speaking. In another conceptualization, the vantage point is off-stage and the entire ABC trajectory is being profiled, which provides the reader with a durative (or in this case, repetitive) interpretation of the event. When über is used as a postposition, though, only the second conceptualization is possible, which is illustrated in sentence 15b (in English, the durative interpretation is conveyed by the verb’s continuous aspect “been raining”).
136 Liamkina (15) a. Über das Jahr over the year
sehen wir uns see we us
wieder. again
‘We will see each other again in a year.’ ‘We will see each other again in the course of the year.’ b. Den ganzen Tag über hatte es geregnet. the entire day over had it rained ‘It had been raining for the entire day.’ Again, one of the signs that a meaning constitutes a separate sense is the ambiguity of a sentence when two senses compete for interpretation. For example, the sentence in 16 is ambiguous, depending on the larger context. (16) Er hat den Aufsatz über die Ferien geschrieben. he has the essay over/about the vacation written ‘He wrote the essay about the vacation.’ ‘He wrote the essay during vacation.’ Although in their book Tyler and Evans do not deal with a temporal sense of over, it is evident from sentence 17 that over profiles a temporal relationship. In contrast to German über, over can only be used to indicate a durative aspect of a temporal relationship, and not a punctual one—the way über can in 15a. (17) David got wiser over the years. 3.8. Causality Sense (2E1). Time is often characterized not in temporal expressions (one year, the entire day), but in terms of processes that take place during a certain time period. Thus, in sentence 18 duration of time is implied in the process of reading; the event (falling asleep) is conceptualized as a point on the time ABC trajectory, which is profiled in its entirety.
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(18) Über dem Lesen ist er eingeschlafen. over the reading is he fallen+asleep ‘He fell asleep while/because he was reading.’ However, in addition to the purely temporal reading, this sentence has another interpretation, namely that the person fell asleep because of reading. This can be explained by the fact that temporal relationships are very often experientially correlated with cause and effect, and therefore we tend to interpret two co-occurring or subsequent events as one causing the other (whether we are right to draw such conclusions is another matter). Therefore, conditional and temporal readings can often be interchanged and augment one another.6 The fact that the sentence has
6
For instance, it is often possible in English to substitute if for when. When we talk about a condition, we automatically imply a certain moment in time when this condition is realized, and vice versa. Let us consider the sentences below in i–iii. (i) If he’s already gone, (then) they will have to leave a message. (Sweetser 1990) There is a clear conditional content-domain reading of i described by Sweetser: “‘his’ absence is a sufficient condition for ‘their’ leaving a message, in the real world” (p. 123). At the same time, the temporal reading is also implied in this sentence. When will they have to leave a message?—when they discover that he is already gone. By the same token, we can often read conditionality in the when-temporals, as in ii. (ii) When you want to go to the movies, give me a call. The temporal reading of this sentence is: at that point of time in the future, when the hearer wants to go to the movies, s/he should call the speaker (and then they can go together, or the speaker will organize the free tickets for the hearer, or give the hearer a ride, etc.). The sentence can also be read as: in case (if) the hearer wants to go to the movies, s/he should call the speaker. The conditional reading of sentence ii also satisfies the “sufficient conditionality requirement” proposed by Van der Auwera (cited in Sweetser 1990:113), with the hearer’s desire to go to the movies being a sufficient condition for calling the speaker. Therefore, we can substitute the conjunction if for when, without changing much in the meaning of the sentence. This closeness in meaning must have given rise to polysemy of the conjunction wenn in German (meaning both if and when),
138 Liamkina two interpretations—that is, the sentential context cannot disambiguate it—lends support to the claim that causality represents a distinct sense for über. The causality sense is much more clearly evident in the sentences in 19, in which the time aspect plays just a minor role by virtue of impossibility of any event happening outside of a time frame. (19) a. Über der Aufregung vergaß ich, meine Mutter anzurufen. over the excitement forgot I, my mother to-call ‘In all the excitement I forgot to call my mother.’ b. Über dem Lärm wachte er auf. over the noise woke he up ‘He woke up because of the noise.’ Note that in these sentences über cannot be felicitously interpreted as “higher than the LM,” indicating that the implicature of cause is conventionalized. 3.9. Covering Sense (3). Covering sense arises in the instances when the conceptualization involves two changes from the protoscene (“higher-than-the-LM” sense): the TR is larger than the LM and the vantage point shifts from off-stage (default) to higher than the TR, as exemplified in 20. (20) Man entfernte die neuere Farbschicht über der alten Bemalung. One removed the newer paint+layer over the old painting ‘The newer layer of paint over the older painting was removed.’ Our interpretation of 20 includes the understanding that the older layer of paint was obscured from view by the newer one. To evoke this which leads to the fact that the same sentence can be read as either conditional or temporal, depending on the context, as in iii. (iii) Wenn du ins Kino gehen willst, ruf mich doch mal an. ‘When you want to go to the movies, give me a call.’ ‘If you want to go to the movies, give me a call.’
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interpretation, the TR does not have to be a continuous entity; it can consist of separate objects belonging to one class (or what Lakoff (1987) calls a “multiplex trajector”), as in 21. (21) Das Kind hatte sein Spielzeug über den ganzen Raum verteilt. the child had his toys over the entire room spread ‘The child spread his toys over the entire room.’ We interpret 21 as “the entire room floor was covered with the child’s toys.” It can be argued that in this case—because of the possible covering interpretation—über adds emphasis to the fact that there were a lot of toys on the floor, as if one almost could not see the floor itself. The fact that we obtain a covering reading in 22, where the TR is not vertically higher than the LM, lends further support to the claim that the “covering” sense is instantiated in semantic memory for über and is not an on-line constructed meaning. (22) a. Er tapezierte einfach über die alte Tapete. he put-wall-paper simply over the old wallpaper ‘He simply put new wallpaper over the old one.’ b. Sie trug einen Mantel über dem Kleid. she wore a coat over the dress ‘She wore a coat over the dress.’ In addition to suspending the vertical superiority of the TR, the covering relationship “involves the suspension of a meaning component essential to the central [primary] sense, that is, lack of contact between TR and LM” (Taylor 1986:18). We saw in 10b above that the TR cannot be interpreted as being in contact with the LM, producing a nonconventional “ghost” reading precisely because the protoscene for über has a distance between the TR and LM as its inherent feature. In contrast to that, for the “covering” sense to arise, the TR and LM almost always have to be in contact with each other. The TR-LM configurations for 22a and 22b are schematically represented figure 5.
140 Liamkina
vertical bar—LM elongated sphere—TR (see 22a)
horizontal bar—LM, arc—TR (see 22b)
Figure 5. Covering sense. 3.10. Focus of Attention Sense (4). Another change of vantage point leads to the development of a distinct “focus-of-attention” sense. The construal that gives rise to it is the result of the shift from the off-stage vantage point to that of the TR, with the TR’s line of vision directed at the LM. Consider the sentence in 23. (23) Sie sitzt den ganzen Tag über ihren Büchern. She sits the whole day over her books ‘She sits over her books the whole day.’ This scene can be spatially conceptualized as a person (TR) sitting at the table with her upper body physically higher than the books on the table (LM) she is looking at. Since looking at an object entails focusing attention on it, we understand 23 as “she is focusing her attention on the activity of reading the books.” Again, once instantiated in the semantic memory, this sense can be used to mediate relationships between non-animate as well as nonphysical TRs and LMs, as in 24 and 25. In 24, the TR is an object (a book) that by itself cannot have the cognitive capacity of paying attention. However, deconstructing this conventionalized metaphor, we understand that the little girl was the focus of attention of the author who wrote the book. (24) Dieses Buch ist über ein kleines Mädchen. this book is over a little girl ‘This book is about a little girl.’
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In 25, the focus of attention (the LM) is a state of affairs, not a physical object or even a process. (25) Ich weinte über den Tod meiner Oma. I cried over the death of-my grandmother ‘I cried over the death of my grandmother.’ Native speakers also discern the sense of causality in 25: not only the TR (I) cried about the death of the grandmother, but simultaneously because of it. The strength of Tyler and Evans’s model consists precisely in allowing several senses to contribute to a particular interpretation, nuancing each usage of the particle. They specifically hypothesize that speakers may differ in the routes that they take in deriving interpretations (Tyler and Evans 2001:750). In this case, it is possible to arrive at the “causality” interpretation either through a temporal sense or through a “focus-of-attention” sense, depending on the overall context. 3.11. Up Cluster. The four senses in this cluster arise from construing the TR as being vertically elevated or up relative to the LM. The upward orientation is generally quite meaningful in human experience; it is experientially correlated with such positive and desirable states as being strong, healthy, in control (see Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980:14–21) discussion of ubiquitous metaphors such as “happy is up, health and life are up”), and consequently assigns a superior status to the TR relative to the LM—a characteristic absent from the primary sense of über. 3.12. “More” Sense (5A). Vertical elevation and quantity are associated through experiential correlation (Grady 1997). For instance, when the level of water in one glass is comparatively higher than the level of water in another glass, we assume that the first glass contains a larger quantity of water. By the same token, because über is associated with a vertical elevation of the TR, an implicature of having more of some entity is associated with über. Hence, über can imply the larger quantity of some entity and can often be paraphrased by mehr als (‘more than’), as in 26.
142 Liamkina (26) Das Buch kostet über (= mehr als) 100 euro. The book costs over 100 euros ‘The book costs over (= more than) 100 euros.’ A very specific instance of the “more” sense is present in the grammatical construction NOUN über NOUN, as in 27. (27) Menschen über Menschen strömten ins Stadion. People over people streamed into+the stadium ‘People after/upon people streamed into the stadium.’ Our interpretation of this sentence is not only that there were very many people (if the speaker wanted to convey just that, then she would choose to say sehr viele Menschen ‘very many people’), but it also contains additional shading of surprise caused by the fact that there were more people than expected. 3.13. Over-and-Above Sense (5A1). The “over-and-above” sense adds the interpretation of “too much” to the “more” sense, to which it is closely related. It probably originated from reanalyzing the scenes involving a container (LM), whose capacity has been exceeded by the excess of the TR (see Bellavia 1996:93–98). An excellent example of such a scene is provided by the sentence in 28: the rise in vertical elevation (and consequently rise in quantity) of the TR leads to the filling of the container to the point of exceeding its capacity. (28) Der Wein läuft über den Rand des Glasses. the wine runs over the rim of-the glass ‘The wine is running over the rim of the glass.’ Just like with the conceptualization of containment, TR and LM do not have to be physical entities: (29) Das geht über den Spaß. this goes over the fun ‘It is beyond what we can call fun.’
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In sentence 29, we conceptualize fun (Spaß) as a container, which can be filled with different activities or emotions characterized as amusing. When there is an excess of such activities and the capacity of the container is not enough to hold them, it results in “spillage,” which then defeats the purpose of the container and contradicts its name (in this case, “fun”). Another example of this sense for über is found in 30, where a person is conceptualized as a container whose capacity is exceeded by a certain behavior or activity. (30) Das ist mir über! this is to-me over ‘I am fed up with this!’ In fact, Bellavia (1996:93–98) demonstrates that this sense is very productive in describing emotions because we conceptualize our bodies as containers for them. She is also concerned with a distinction between separable and inseparable prefix verbs, and points out an important regularity in the kinds of processes that are described with either separable or inseparable verbs. Whenever a process or an emotion fits a covering schema, then an inseparable verb is used, as in 31a,b. (31) a. Der Strom hat das Land überflutet. the river has the land over+flooded ‘The river flooded the land.’ (inseparable) b. Ein Gefühl der Scham überflutet a feeling of shame over+floods
sie. her
‘A feeling of shame overcomes her.’ (inseparable) When a process fits an out-of-the-container schema, it is expressed by a separable verb, as in 32a,b.7 7
Bellavia (1996) further places these regularities into a larger pattern: she argues that the ARC-schema is conceptually central for the prefix über in both separable and inseparable verbs, but if the TR “displaces from one point to another, the speaker uses the separable verb. While if the TR moves over the entire LM [that is, covers it], the speaker uses the inseparable structure” (p. 93).
144 Liamkina (32) a. Das Wasser ist übergeschwappt. the water is over-slopped ‘The water slopped over.’ (separable) b. Er ist vor Zorn übergeschwappt. he is of anger over-slopped ‘His anger burst out.’ (separable) In accordance with Bellavia and the framework developed in this paper, one could say that inseparable verbs are formed with the “covering” sense of über and separable ones with its “over-and-above” sense. I return to this important distinction in the next section in order to examine the larger pattern of interaction between various senses and (in)separability of verbal prefixes. For now, note also that the “over-and-above” sense practically always has a negative connotation in contrast with another excess sense, “above-and-beyond.” This negative connotation comes from our understanding of the purpose of a container: it is supposed to “hold in” whatever we put in it. If the capacity of a container is exceeded, it no longer can serve its purpose, which we certainly perceive as a negative experience. 3.14. Control Sense (5B). Due to an experiential correlation between control and vertical elevation, over becomes associated with a sense of control through the conceptualization of the TR as being vertically elevated relative to the LM. Therefore, for sentence 33 we get the reading of “being in control,” rather than the anomalous reading of the TR being higher than the LM.
Bellavia extends this rule to cover the uses of separable and inseparable verbs describing spatial scenes, emotions, and “communication metaphors.” Although she provides interesting observations, they lack explanatory power to account for these regularities. In addition, it is not clear whether her hypothesis would hold if used to account for all the separable and inseparable über-verbs, since she looks at a semantically limited group.
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(33) Er steht über dieser schwierigen Situation. he stands over this difficult situation ‘He has control over this difficult situation.’ The presence of the “control” sense in the network can be particularly well illustrated by juxtaposing two sentences that describe the same event: (34) a. Das Pferd ist über den Zaun gesprungen. The horse is over the fence jumped ‘The horse (has) jumped over the fence.’ b. Das Pferd hat den Zaun übersprungen. the horse has the fence over+jumped ‘The horse (has) jumped over the fence.’ Although the English translations are the same, the two sentences differ in a very important way, as described by Bellavia (1996:100): “in both sentences […] the horse goes beyond the fence but in [34a] the LM (introduced by the prepositional phrase) is conceived as the purely spatial reference point for the TR to go beyond; whereas in [34b] the transitive clause stresses the superiority of the TR over the LM (the direct object of the sentence) and the obstacle appears to be dominated by the mover” (emphasis in the original). Thus, in addition to the purely spatial understanding that the horse ended up beyond the fence, which comes from the “on-the-other-side-of” sense of the ABC trajectory, we also interpret this sentence as an achievement of the horse in overcoming an obstacle, stemming from the “control” sense of über. 3.15. Better Sense (5C). In the sentences in 35, the TR and the LM are non-physical entities and the reading is that the TR is better than the LM. (35) a. Seine Leistung lag über dem Niveau. his achievement lay over the average-level ‘His achievement was above the average level.’
146 Liamkina b. Die Veranstaltung war über alles Erwarten. the event was over all expectation ‘The event was above all expectations.’ The likely origin of this sense is the experiential correlation metaphor “up is good” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). We associate the physical state of being up with wellness or other positive states, while being down is associated with negative states (such as, for instance, being ill).8 Since it is better to be in a positive state than in a negative one, we deduce that “up is better (than down).” The “better” meaning is not apparent in any other senses: there is nothing in the spatial “higher-than-the-LM” scene that would indicate that the TR is somehow superior with respect to the LM. It is also juxtaposed in a way to the “above-and-beyond” sense, but whereas in the “above-and-beyond” sense the TR is understood as having missed an intended or desired target and having gone beyond it (which has a negative flavoring), in the “better” sense the TR is understood as meeting the desired point and going beyond it with a resulting positive connotation. Often, the “better” sense is associated with subjectively defined preferences (see Bellavia 1996:85), which is particularly apparent when über is used in expressions with the verb gehen ‘to go’: (36) a. Die Musik geht ihm über alles. the music goes him over all ‘He loves music more than anything else.’ b. Es geht nichts über die Gesundheit. it goes nothing over the health ‘There is nothing more important than health.’ 4. Particle über as a Separable and Inseparable Verbal Prefix. As has been already mentioned, the German spatial particle über can also function as a verbal prefix, which either separates when the verb is moved/conjugated (separable prefix) or stays attached to the verb 8
While Lakoff and Johnson based their analysis on English, I believe this metaphor is also applicable to German. However, it is important to remember that such metaphors are by no means universal.
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(inseparable prefix). Traditional grammars (for example, Helbig and Buscha 1970) do not link the prepositional and prefix usage of über in their descriptions, although there is diachronic evidence that the transformation of a preposition into a prefix is a very old process for German (Wunderlich 1983). Besides, on a synchronic level the meanings of prefixes and spatial prepositions are clearly related, as evidenced in the examples provided in this paper. One common observation is that the separable prefix usually preserves the original local meaning of the verb, whereas the inseparable prefix either changes it (see 37a) or adds a new dimension that is not present in either the particle or verb when taken separately. At the same time, the “original” meanings of both the particle and verb are also traceable. In example 37b, neither the sense of “without paying attention” nor the sense of “death” is present in the meanings of über or either one of the verbs. (37) a. legen über|legen überlegen
‘place something in a horizontal position’ ‘put something over somebody’ (separable) ‘consider, think over, reflect’ (inseparable)
b. fahren ‘drive’ über|fahren ‘ferry someone over’ (separable) überfahren ‘drive over someone [without paying attention] resulting in death or injury’ (inseparable) lesen ‘read’ überlesen ‘overlook, miss when reading’ (inseparable) Although traditional accounts rarely look for further patterns or attempt explanations for the above phenomena, Dewell (1996) convincingly demonstrates that there are predictable regularities, semantic in nature, that underlie the alternations in uses of über as a preposition, or a separable or inseparable prefix. Dewell offers a compelling explanation for them based on a syntactic analysis that focuses on the sequence of processing the constituents. Dewell observes that prepositional constructions and separable verbs are essentially similar, since they both describe spatial path scenes. In both constructions, über and the verb retain their independence as syntactic heads of their respective phrases. Prepositional constructions are used when the LM is significant enough to be mentioned (see 38a),
148 Liamkina while separable verbal constructions tend to occur in situations in which the LM is construed as a highly abstract boundary and is usually gapped (see 38b). (38) a. Sie springt über den Graben. she jumps over the ditch ‘She jumps over the ditch.’ b. Sie springt hinüber. she jumps DIRECTIONAL PARTICLE+over ‘She jumps over here.’ Since purely spatial scenes can be adequately described by the above structures, it is not pragmatically useful to employ inseparable verbs for this purpose. They only come into consideration “when the speaker wishes to mark the event as transitive (and aspectually more punctual, with a pronounced focus on the LM)” and thus fill “more specialized pragmatic niches” (Dewell 1996:117–118); for instance, in situations of overcoming an obstacle or skipping a grade, as shown in 39a,b. In short, inseparable constructions do not describe where the TR goes with respect to the LM, they describe what the TR does to the LM. (39) a. Sie überspringt den Graben. she over+jumps the ditch ‘She jumps over the ditch.’ b. Sie überspringt die zweite Klasse. she over+jumps the second grade ‘She skips the second grade.’ Dewell argues that there is an aspectual dissonance in sentence processing between the path profile of a compound inseparable verb and the transitive profile of the construction that inseparable verbs fit into. The path profile of über leads past the LM, which at the end of the trajectory is behind us and unaffected by the TR. By contrast, the transitive profile introduces the LM, which is directly affected by the action described by
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the verb, as the culminating event in the processing. Therefore, the tension between “a durative path leading beyond the LM and a transitive act implying a punctual arrival at the LM” (p. 126) forces us to interpret inseparable constructions as “acts” rather than “paths,” as well as endow them with additional specialized connotations. Dewell (1996:129) contends that an “adequate analysis [of separable and inseparable über-verbs] will need to be embedded in a more general framework which includes studies of the other variable prefixes and of prefixes generally.” I wholeheartedly agree and would add to this list studies of particle semantic structures, since they may provide this kind of larger frame of reference in which the semantics of prefixal uses of these particles can be better understood and which would complement other approaches, such as Dewell’s. If we look at all über-verbs, we notice that they fall into several categories according to the senses of über combined with the root verbs. The overwhelming majority of inseparable verbs (both with concrete and abstract TRs and LMs) combines with über particles that express one of the following three senses (some of the verbs have already been discussed above): i. Covering überblicken überdecken überdachen überfluten überschwemmen übergießen uberkleben
‘oversee’ ‘cover with a blanket’ ‘cover with a roof’ ‘overflow’ ‘overflood’ ‘cover an object by pouring something over it’ ‘cover by gluing something over’
ii. Above-and-beyond überdehnen ‘stretch too much’ überbieten ‘offer more than someone else at an auction’ überdosieren ‘overdose’ einen Flug überbuchen ‘overbook the flight’ überfragen ‘ask too much’ überfüllen ‘overfill’ überheizen ‘overheat’
150 Liamkina
iii. Control überfliegen überspringen überklettern überwinden überstehen
‘manage to get to the other side of an obstacle by flying over’ ‘jump over an obstacle’ ‘climb over an obstacle’ ‘overcome’ ‘overcome, withstand, survive’
In contrast, the use of über in separable verbs (again, with concrete and abstract TRs and LMs) can be traced back to three other different senses of über. iv. Protoscene überdecken übergießen einen Mantel überhaben die Beine überschlagen überschütten
‘to put something that serves as a blanket on top of something’ ‘to pour on top of’ ‘to wear a coat’ ‘cross the legs, literally: to put one leg over another’ ‘to sprinkle on top of something’
v. Over-and-above überfließen or überfluten überhören überhaben überkochen übersprühen
‘to overflow out of a container’ ‘to hear more than enough of something’ ‘to have more than enough of something’ ‘about food or water: to spill out of a container while boiling’ ‘about emotions: bubble over’
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vi. On-the-other-side-of (used with verbs of motion and gapped LMs) überfahren überführen übergehen übergreifen/überschlagen übermalen übersetzen überspringen übertreten
‘drive to the other side’ ‘lead to the other side’ ‘go to the other side’ ‘spread’ ‘unintentionally paint over the border’ ‘ferry over’ ‘jump over’ ‘step over’
Note that one and the same verb, for instance überlaufen, may have up to four meanings (or potentially even more) arising from four different senses of über. The inseparable über contributes the sense of “covering” to the verb in 40a and the sense of “control” in 40b, whereas the separable über contributes the “over and above” sense to überlaufen in 40c and the “on-the-other-side-of” sense in 40d. (40) a. Ein Frösteln überlief sie. a shiver over+ran her ‘A shiver overcame her.’ b. Sie überlief die Hurden technisch perfekt. she over+ran the hurdles technically perfectly ‘Her technique in overcoming the hurdles was perfect.’ c. Das Benzin ist aus dem Tank übergelaufen the petrol is from the tank over+ran ‘The petrol overflowed from the tank.’ d. Soldaten sind zu den Rebellen übergelaufen. soldiers are to the rebels over+ran ‘Soldiers defected to the rebels.’ If we look at the senses that give rise to separable versus inseparable prefixes, we can see that the ones resulting in separable prefixes reflect purely spatial configurations between TR and LM, whereas the ones
152 Liamkina resulting in inseparable prefixes reflect not spatial but functional relationships. I would argue that the protoscene (for obvious reasons), “on-the-other-side-of,” and “over-and-above” senses reflect recurrent spatial configurations: TR higher than the LM, TR on the other side of the LM at the endpoint of ABC trajectory, and TR crossing the boundary of a container (LM), which is overfilled. By contrast, the three senses involved in the formation of inseparable prefixes all reflect functional elements not part of the spatial scenes from which these senses originate: the functional relationship of covering, going beyond the intended target (in the “above-and-beyond” sense), and control. Such “division of labor” is consistent with the phenomena described by Bellavia (1996) and Dewell (1994, 1996). Inseparable verbs of motion take the auxiliary haben in the present perfect (and not sein) because they do not describe purely spatial scenes, where motion is the primary event and auxiliary sein would be appropriate. They are employed to describe “acts” or functional scenes precisely because the crucial contribution of the four senses of über mentioned above enables them to do so. The claim that purely spatial senses are involved in the creation of separable verbs is also consistent with observations made by many researchers that roots and prefixes in separable verbs maintain their autonomy (expressed in primary stresses on the root and on the prefix, and in freedom of movement of the prefix itself), and are often semantically “decomposable” into a verb and a prepositional phrase (see Heinisch 1977). Given the above regularities, I would disagree with Dewell’s (1996: 120–122) assessment that inseparable verbs (a) “fill particular niches” in non-spatial domains such as “overcoming, overwhelming, bypassing, or overlooking, […] surpassing or outdoing, […] and holistic perception,” or (b) are restricted to “transfer of possession, transmitting information, transfer of medium, or persuasion to change sides on an issue.” Relying too much on the specific semantics of the verbs and too little on the semantic structure of über as a particle (and not only as a prefix) leads to this high degree of granularity that obscures the larger trends suggested above. Dewell is both right and wrong when he says: “[inseparable] verbs can be traced semantically to spatial constructions, but they are variants specific to the particular verbs as units, filling restricted gaps in the lexical system, not general path images applied to other domains” (p. 121). Indeed, inseparable verbs do not represent path images (in concrete or abstract domains), since the senses of their prefixes are non-spatial
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ones. However, combining these non-spatial senses with verbs results in covering of large semantic domains and not simply “restricted gaps.” If we consider all the über-verbs, we see that there are many more inseparable than separable verbs. Apparently, only a few verbs are readily combined with spatial senses of über, whereas many more verbs can harmoniously combine with non-spatial senses (at first glance, it is a very semantically diverse group of verbs). The question of what kinds of verbs are compatible with spatial senses of über and why merits further investigation. Another challenge is presented by the inseparable verbs, the meaning of which possesses a new dimension not readily traced back to any of the senses of the prefix or to the meanings of the root verb. Very often such verbs have two diametrically opposed meanings. Compare the two meanings of übersehen in 41a,b. (41) a. Ich kann von hier aus die ganze Straße übersehen. I can from here out the entire street over+see ‘From here I can see the entire street.’ b. Der Lehrer übersah einen Fehler. the teacher over+saw a mistake ‘The teacher missed a mistake.’ The interpretation of 41a is more or less straightforward: it is prompted by the “covering” sense of über, and as a result we understand that the range of vision of the TR (I) covers the entire street. The interpretation of 41b is more complex: our understanding that the teacher missed a mistake probably comes from the “above-and-beyond” sense of über, which prompts us to conceptualize the LM (in this case “mistake”) as an intended target that was missed by the TR. What makes 41b more intriguing (and what makes the two meanings of the verb oppose each other) is the intentionality aspect: while the overseeing of the street is the result of an intended action, the mistake was missed inadvertently, and it is not an inherent feature of the “above-and-beyond” sense and actually contradicts another sense of über, namely “focus-of-attention.” The same “lack of attention” meaning distinguishes one of the meanings of several other verbs from the “covering” sense: überlesen
154 Liamkina ‘accidentally miss while reading’ versus ‘quickly read something again to get the general meaning’; überschlagen ‘miss while leafing through a book’ versus ‘intentionally leave out a chapter in a book’; überhören ‘accidentally or because of lack of attention not hear something’ versus ‘intentionally not react to something as if not having heard it’; überfahren (as in einen Ampel überfahren ‘to accidentally run the red light’), etc. Moreover, überfahren also means ‘to injure or kill by driving over’ and überstimmen can mean ‘to win the voting’ or ‘to reject or turn down a proposal’. The question is: where do the meanings of lack of attention, injury or death, winning, or rejecting come from? They are not part of the semantic network of über, nor are they part of the meanings of the root verbs: schlagen means ‘to beat, strike, hit’, fahren means ‘to drive’, and stimmen ‘to vote’.9 These additional meanings may be the result of the process of BLENDING studied in detail by Fauconnier and Turner (1994, 1996; see also Fauconnier 1997) and defined as a cognitive operation, which “consists in integrating partial structures from two separate domains into a single structure with emergent properties within a third domain” (Fauconnier 1997:22). To use Fauconnier’s example, when we map the notion of a virus from the domain of health onto the domain of computers, we create a blended notion of virus that incorporates the properties of the source domains and goes beyond them. In the blend, the notion of virus is not restricted to the members of the input domains of health and computers anymore, but can create members in other domains, such as social or mental viruses. The crucial aspect of a blend is that it is typically richer than the input categories that are elaborated to create this emergent structure. It is quite possible that such a process is involved in the creation of some inseparable verbs. Let us consider überfahren. If we assume that the meaning ‘to accidentally kill or injure while driving’ is a blend, we should examine the input domains of the root verb (driving) and the particle (über). Note that the blend inherits the structures of the input domains only partially, which means that not all of the features of the input scenario “to drive” 9
Note, though, that the scenario of driving does not exclude a fatal accident, just like the scenario of voting actually presupposes that one side will win, while the other side will be rejected. This is not to say, however, that “to drive” automatically means “to kill,” or “to vote” automatically leads to “to win.”
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will be incorporated in the blend. In this case, the processes of turning the wheel, speeding up, slowing down, or making turns are not relevant in the blend; what is inherited in überfahren is some kind of vehicle, big enough to harm a human or animal. Similarly, not all meanings of über will be relevant; the one that is probably most relevant is the sense of “control.” In the moment of contact with the vehicle, the victim of überfahren (LM) is under the total control of this vehicle (TR)—to the point that the victim cannot resist the vehicle’s force that causes the victim’s injury or death. While the implicature of injury or death is not inherent in the notions of driving or control, they are not incompatible with them, which allows the blend to emerge in the first place. There is at least one more family of inseparable verbs, in which blending results in the added dimension of “transfer” or more specifically “change in possession” (übereignen, over+possess: ‘transfer possession’; überantworten, over+answer: ‘transfer responsibility for something’; übernehemen, over+take: ‘take over’; überreichen, over+give: ‘hand over’, überschreiben, over+write: ‘sign something over to someone’; etc.). Considering this systematicity, one could potentially argue that the sense of “transfer” is part of the semantic network for über and, therefore, produces the above meanings when combined with the verbs. However, such an argument would mean that we have to include the multitude of other meanings discussed above into the network, such as “death” or “lack of attention,” which would make the task of constraining the network practically impossible. There is another factor that speaks against the inclusion of a “transfer” meaning, as well as the others, into the network: when used as a preposition, über does not exhibit any of these meanings, they only surface when the particle is fused with the root verb as an inseparable prefix.10 Given the diachronic development of particles from their prepositional usage to their use as inseparable prefixes, it is reasonable to assign primacy to the prepositional usages in defining what constitutes a semantic network. Therefore, in addition to Tyler and Evans’s criteria for establishing distinct senses, we may need to include a third one, specific for German: a sense counts as distinct if a particle exhibits it when used
10
Note that for English over the “transfer” sense also arises only when over functions as an adprep, and not as a preposition (Tyler and Evans 2001:751).
156 Liamkina as a preposition, and not only as an inseparable prefix. Needless to say, we would need empirical data from native speakers to validate this claim. The scope of this paper does not allow for further exploration of this issue. However, this question undoubtedly merits a deeper investigation within Cognitive Linguistics. Further research may reveal, for instance, why all senses of über are not as productive as the six discussed in forming either separable or inseparable verbs. It would also be extremely important for the support or refusal of the above claims to examine the semantic networks of other spatial particles participating in verb formation to determine if similar trends hold for them as well (that is, spatial senses for separable prefixes and non-spatial senses for inseparable prefixes). The application of the blending hypothesis to the shifts of meaning in inseparable verbs also deserves further investigation. 5. Semantic Network for über. In this analysis, I have identified thirteen distinct senses for the spatial particle über, including the protoscene (see figure 1 above for a graphic representation of the network): 1. Protoscene (higher-than-the-LM) 2. ABC trajectory cluster: 2A. On-the-other-side-of sense 2B. Medium sense 2C. Above-and-beyond sense 2D. Via sense 2E. Temporal sense 2E1. Causality sense 3. Covering sense 4. Focus-of-attention sense 5. Up cluster: 5A. More sense 5A1. Over-and-above sense 5B. Control sense 5C. Better sense In the process of the analysis of über, I have also discovered two additional senses for English over: “medium” and “temporal.” Below is
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the expanded list of over senses (with the added senses underscored and the senses that are common to both over and über bolded):11 1. Protoscene 2. ABC trajectory cluster: 2A. On-the-other-side-of sense 2B. Above-and-beyond (excess I) sense 2C. Completion sense 2D. Transfer sense 2D1: Medium sense 2E. Temporal sense 3. Covering sense 4. Examining sense 4A. Focus-of-attention sense 5. Up cluster: 5A. More sense 5A1. Over-and-above (excess II) sense 5B. Control sense 5C. Preference sense 6. Reflexive sense 6A. Repetition sense 6. Conclusion. In this paper, I investigated the semantic structure of the German spatial particle über using the Polysemy Network Model proposed by Tyler and Evans (2003). Their methodology proved to be a helpful construct in identifying the distinct senses associated with über. In addition, it can be used potentially as a principled way of investigating other spatial particles and describing them in reference materials, such as GermanGerman or bilingual dictionaries and teaching materials. To further strengthen Tyler and Evans’s methodology, it might be useful to add one more criterion for establishing a primary sense, namely frequency of occurrence of this sense in the current spoken and written language. 11
This is not to suggest that these common senses for English and German particles cover exactly the same semantic space in both languages, but only where the closest correspondences between the meanings are; for instance, the “better” sense in the semantic network for über has many similarities with the “preference” sense of over.
158 Liamkina Additionally, it seems reasonable to postulate a German-specific criterion for determining distinct senses (for those particles that can function both as prepositions and prefixes): to be counted as distinct, a sense has to be instantiated when a particle is used as a preposition, and not only as an inseparable prefix. The examination of the usage of spatial particles as separable and inseparable verbal prefixes, and their contribution to the meaning construction in these and other composite forms, constitutes in my view a very promising direction for further research in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics.
REFERENCES Bellavia, Elena. 1996. The German über. The construal of space in language and thought, ed. by Martin Pütz and Rene Dirven, 73–107. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Brugman, Claudia. 1981. The story of over: Polysemy, semantics, and the structure of the lexicon. New York: Garland Publishing. Dewell, Robert. 1994. Over again: Image-schema transformations in semantic analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 5.351–380. Dewell, Robert. 1996. The separability of German über-: A cognitive approach. The construal of space in language and thought, ed. by Martin Pütz and Rene Dirven, 109–133. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Duden. 1981. Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut Mannheim. Duden. 2001. Deutsches Universalwörterbuch. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. Mappings in thought and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 1994. Conceptual projection and middle spaces. UCSD Cognitive Science Technical Report, University of California San Diego. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 1996. Blending as a central process of grammar. Conceptual structure, discourse, and language, ed. by Adele Goldberg, 113–129. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information (distributed by Cambridge University Press). Grady, Joseph. 1997. A typology of motivation for conceptual metaphor: correlation vs. resemblance. Paper presented at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam. Heinisch, Regina. 1977. The decomposability of prefix verbs from the viewpoint of Slovak-German translation. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 22.623–628.
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Helbig, Gerhard, and Joachim Buscha. 1970. Deutsche Grammatik. Berlin: Langenscheidt. Kreitzer, Anatol. 1997. Multiple levels of schematization: A study in the conceptualization of space. Cognitive Linguistics 8.291–325. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books. Langacker, Ronald. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald. 1992. Prepositions as grammatical(izing) elements. Leuvense Bijdragen 81.287–309. Langenscheidt. 2003. Großwörterbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Berlin: Langenscheidt KG. Pfeifer, Wolfgang. 1989. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Richter, Hans. P. 2001. Damals war es Friedrich. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Sandra, Dominiek, and Sally Rice. 1995. Network analyses of prepositional meaning: Mirroring whose mind—the linguist’s or the language user’s? Cognitive Linguistics 6.89–130. Schmitz, Werner. 1961. Der Gebrauch der deutschen Präpositionen. Munich: M. Hueber Verlag. Schröder, Jochen. 1986. Lexikon deutscher Präpositionen. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie. Smith, Michael. 1987. The semantics of dative and accusative in German: An investigation in cognitive grammar. Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego. Smith, Michael. 2005. The conceptual structure of German impersonal constructions. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17.79–140. Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, Leonard. 1983. How language structures space. Spatial orientation, ed. by Herbert L. Pick and Linda Acredolo, 225–282. New York: Plenum Press. Taylor, John. 1986. Contrasting prepositional categories: English and Italian. Paper no. 162, series A. University of Duisburg: Linguistic Agency. Traugott, Elizabeth. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65.31–55. Tyler, Andrea, and Vyvian Evans. 2001. Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of over. Language 77.724–765.
160 Liamkina Tyler, Andrea, and Vyvian Evans. 2003. Spatial scenes: A cognitive approach to English prepositions and the experiential basis of meaning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Vandeloise, Claude. 1991. Spatial prepositions: A case study in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vandeloise, Claude. 1994. Methodology and analyses of the preposition in. Cognitive Linguistics 5.157–184. Wahrig, Gerhard. 1978. Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Wahrig, Gerhard. 1994. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Gütersloh, Germany: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag. Wunderlich, Dieter. 1983. On the compositionality of German prefix verbs. Meaning, use, and interpretation of language, ed. by Rainer Bäuerle, Christoph Schwarze, and Arnim von Stechow, 452–465. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Georgetown University Department of German Intercultural Center 468A Washington, DC 20057–1048 USA [
[email protected]]
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REVIEWS
Lautverschiebungen in den germanischen Sprachen. By Kurt Gustav Goblirsch. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005. Pp. 308. Hardcover. 58. Reviewed by JOSEPH C. SALMONS , University of Wisconsin—Madison In this book, Kurt Goblirsch revisits and synthesizes many years of his previous publications with the worthwhile goal of establishing a common mechanism driving systemwide changes in Germanic obstruents. Like his earlier work, this book is notable for the tremendous amount of dialect data it reviews. In the preface, the author rejects the “theoretische Richtung Noam Chomskys [Noam Chomsky’s theoretical course]” (p. 5), and soon thereafter announces his alternative: “Besonders geeignet zur Bewertung der Lautverschiebungen ist der methodologische Ansatz des Prager Strukturalismus” (p. 14).1 This is a curious stance, since neither “Chomskyan theory” (SPE?) nor “Prague School structuralism” is fundamentally a theory of sound change. Besides, Fourquet (1948) and others long ago pursued a Praguean approach to Germanic consonant shifts, and Goblirsch inherits the problems of those hoary analyses. For example, structuralism—just like early generative approaches—tends to be overly mechanistic, and ill-equipped for variation, something addressed directly in much modern work, like Ohalaesque historical phonetics, LabPhon, and Evolutionary Phonology (see Blevins 2004). Goblirsch defines Lautverschiebungen [sound shifts] as “spontane, systematische Lautwandel, obwohl man sich auch darüber streiten kann, wie spontan genau jeder Lautwandel im Einzelnen ist. Sie sind insofern systematisch, als dass sie ein gewisses Teilsystem ändern” (p. 18).2 This 1
“Especially suited to evaluating sound shifts is the methodological approach of Prague structuralism.” 2
“spontaneous, systematic sound changes, although one can also argue about just how spontaneous each change is individually. They are systematic insofar as they can change a particular subsystem.” © Society for Germanic Linguistics
162 Reviews definition could include many changes, but he posits precisely four shifts since Grimm’s Law—the second ( High German!), Icelandic, Danish, and “partial” sound shifts—all unified by a restructuring of obstruent distinctions: a loss of phonological voicing is caused by the rise of aspiration (p. 236). He claims that all shifts follow a very precise path: voiceless stops aspirate, then aspiration gets lengthened and hardens to a fricative, creating an affricate. Its stop phase assimilates to the fricative phase. These steps represent “gradual obstruent weakening,” again following closely in Fourquet’s footsteps.3 Goblirsch provides a typology of modern Germanic obstruent systems, arranged from the presumed most to the least archaic: 1. The ASPIRATIONLESS TYPE, where the series are distinguished by occlusion, voicing, and length; exemplified by Dutch, West Frisian, southern Low German, and Scots. Goblirsch believes these never had aspiration, and have undergone no systematic obstruent changes since Grimm’s Law. 2. The COMMON TYPE, exploiting occlusion, voicing, aspiration, and length; Norwegian, English, and Low German. These have undergone “die Teilweise Verschiebung [partial shift],” having adopted aspiration. 3. The VOICELESS TYPE, exploiting occlusion, aspiration, and length; eastern Danish, Icelandic, southwest Norwegian, and North Frisian. These have undergone Goblirsch’s posited Second Consonant Shift but no “lenition,” abandoning voicing for aspiration, without any lenition. 4. The LENGTH TYPE, exploiting only occlusion and length; Bavarian and Alemannic dialects. 5. The ASPIRATED TYPE, exploiting only occlusion and aspiration; most of Danish, northern Low German, and some Central German dialects. Thus, Goblirsch believes that Dutch and Scots represent archaic, practically West Germanic, patterns, while Upper German is quite 3
Honeybone (2002, and elsewhere) has proposed a nuanced lenition analysis of these changes, but his work is barely acknowledged.
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innovative, and Icelandic takes an intermediate position. Widespread patterns of innovation/conservatism across Germanic—phonetic and phonological, but also lexical, morphological, and otherwise—suggest a different view: Icelandic and the southernmost German dialects are remarkably conservative almost across the board aside from the High German shift, while Dutch and English have evolved away from Northwest Germanic dramatically in virtually every regard. Some effort to harmonize these views would be most welcome. As noted, Goblirsch imagines that all shifts happened in the sixth to eighth centuries, a chronological bottleneck that seems odd given the enduring pattern of similar changes stretching from the potentially preGrimm partial shift of double-stop clusters (+-pt(-) to -ft(-), etc.) to affrications underway today in Liverpool and Copenhagen fortis stops. A constant systemic pressure toward shift corresponds to the facts far better. His direct comparison to modern languages is also jarringly anachronistic. Icelandic was nonexistent at the time of his shift, with the settlement of Iceland, or landnám, only in the ninth to tenth centuries, yet he posits “eine isländische Lautverschiebung [an Icelandic sound shift]” centuries earlier. Many of the other systems he treats as archaic likewise did not exist in the eighth century and were then much later shaped by contact and areal pressures. Where most scholars argue for aspiration from predialectal times, Goblirsch assumes that it arose in the sixth to eighth centuries (p. 74). As argued in these pages by Denton (1998), aspiration almost surely triggered North and West Germanic gemination, and so must have been present centuries earlier. Many varieties without aspiration surely lost it by language contact and others presumably by internal developments (a possibility Goblirsch implicitly dismisses, pp. 78–79). Positing the rise of aspiration independently in myriad dialects, as Goblirsch does, invites needless Occam’s Razor concerns for little apparent gain. In external history, Goblirsch sees Danish influence as driving this single shift across a vast territory, à la Zabrocki (1964, elsewhere). Little evidence is brought for this speculative proposal beyond an assumption that a few invaders or neighbors could transform the fundamental phonetics and phonology of large populations. A long tradition attributes Netherlandic and Scots voicing to historical language contact, yet Goblirsch rejects contact as the source for these phenomena, again without much explicit evidence or argument. Despite the importance of
164 Reviews the assertions made about language contact, no coherent view of language-contact change is presented; instead, it is evoked as deus ex machina. Turning to sound change, Goblirsch’s simple assumption (p. 47, and elsewhere) that aspiration directly “caused” the loss of voicing does not follow. Dutch obstruent cluster assimilations show systematic vestiges of an aspiration-language heritage, so that both features appear phonologically necessary (Iverson and Salmons 2003), and it seems generally prudent to acknowledge the possibility of featural overmarking. One of Goblirsch’s declared innovations is to identify the central role of consonant length in shifts (pp. 40–47). Krähenmann (2001, and elsewhere) provides masterful analyses of this issue for Thurgovian (and other Swiss dialects), covering history, phonetics, and phonology, yet her work is not cited at all. The study of gemination has also been an area of great progress in historical and synchronic phonology for years now, but that research too is mostly ignored. Other basic questions—or outright mistakes—crop up, like these: •
• •
•
4 5
Goblirsch omits Yiddish from all lists of Germanic varieties without aspiration, perhaps over discomfort about the obvious role of language contact in its historical loss of aspiration (p. 22, and elsewhere). He asserts that aspiration was “impossible” in s + stop clusters (p. 21). In fact, s-cluster aspiration is attested in various Indo-European languages (Greek, Armenian, Sanskrit).4 Goblirsch assumes frequently that aspiration characterizes INITIAL syllables, while the distribution is obviously tied to metrical structure or stress, not to word edges. (See the aspiration patterns in German [t], in fatal versus tolerant, for instance.) Goblirsch denies a phonological contrast between OHG
from +d and from +, arguing “vielleicht wollte man wenigstens den orthographischen Unterschied beibehalten” (p. 150).5 This surely oversteps the facts, given how many dialects maintain a distinction down to the present day.
See http://camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog/index.php/2005/11/17/saspirated-stop. “perhaps one wanted to at least maintain the orthographic distinction.”
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The references are vast, taking up pages 246–301 set in small type, and the book is largely built around earlier work, mostly criticizing it. Accordingly, one would expect that the volume would have great value as a review of the literature, but unfortunately the Forschungsbericht overlooks much important recent work, as already exemplified several times above. Other gaps include most of the modern body of work on laryngeal features (like fortis/lenis and spread glottis), some work on consonants in German and Germanic dialects, and so on. For example, among the missing names that one might hope to find on phonetic/ phonological features relevant to Germanic obstruents are William Barry, Andrew Butcher, Sean Fulop, Gunnar Ólafr Hansson, Pétur Helgason, Manfred Pützer, Catherine Ringen, Philip Spälti, Bert Vaux, and Urs Willi. The research review also misses the spirit of some work, including my own. Even so, much of the literature review is superfluous for specialists. For example, the treatment of IE obstruents could be truncated by simply accepting the now generally acknowledged view that “voiced aspirates” were murmured. Coverage in the name index is spotty—not including many scholars whose work is referred to—and the subject index is sometimes wrong, for example, the entry for binnendeutsche Konsonantenschwächung. Typographical errors occur especially in names—Wissman (p. 32, but Wißmann in the references), Hans Heinrich Hock (lege Henrich, p. 67)— and in the references (where the alphabetization is also at times incorrect)—“Imengard” for Irmengard (p. 260), “lanrygeal” for laryngeal (p. 266), etc. Summing up, Goblirsch struggles mightily to make this revival of Fourquet and Zabrocki work, but he faces insurmountable challenges. The proposed chronology is unworkable, the assumed role of language contact implausible, and the understanding of sounds and sound change outdated and problematic. By the end of the book, one fears that the theoretical salvo at the outset was meant as a license to ignore much work from the last half century. That is a shame.
166 Reviews REFERENCES Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denton, Jeanette Marshall. 1998. Phonetic perspectives on West Germanic consonant gemination. American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 10.201–236. Fourquet, Jean. 1948. Les mutations consonantiques du germanique: Essai de position des problèmes. Paris: Belles Lettres. Honeybone, Patrick 2002. Germanic obstruent lenition: Some mutual implications of theoretical and historical phonology. Doctoral dissertation, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Iverson, Gregory, and Joseph Salmons. 2003. Legacy specification in the laryngeal phonology of Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 15.1–26. Krähenmann, Astrid. 2001. Swiss German stops: Geminates all over the word. Phonology 18.109–145. Zabrocki, Ludwik. 1964. Die inneren Gesetze der dänischen Lautverschiebung. Kwartalnik Neofilologczny 11.151–169.
Department of German 818 Van Hise 1220 Linden Dr. University of Wisconsin Madison, WI 53706 USA [[email protected]]
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 19.2 (2007):167–169
Murray’s Musings The present issue marks the halfway point of my tenure as Chair of the JGL Editorial Committee. At this juncture, I would very much like to express my gratitude to Ilana Mezhevich, who has served as Editorial and Production Assistant over this two and a half year period. As Dr. Mezhevich has now completed her doctoral studies—with great success, of course—she is retiring from her JGL position. Her critical assessments of submissions to the JGL, and her truly impressive proofreading and editing skills will be greatly missed. At the same time, I am pleased to announce that another doctoral student at the University of Calgary, Ashley Burnett, has taken over this position. It takes the efforts of many people to produce a journal, and here the work of the referees is indispensable in maintaining a high quality publication. In the interests of maintaining anonymity in the refereeing process, we can only recognize on a five-year cycle the names of colleagues who have contributed to the JGL in this way. In the meantime, let me just say that I remain very grateful to the referees for their hard work and very impressed by the overall level of professionalism, always carried out, of course, without remuneration of any kind. For me, the interaction with the referees—reading the very detailed and thoughtful reports that we invariably receive—is the most interesting and rewarding aspect of being editor. At this time, though, I would also like to single out two colleagues for special mention. First, Richard Page, as Review Editor, continues to provide a wonderful service to the JGL and, more generally, to the discipline of linguistics. His efforts have ensured that there is a steady stream of timely reviews. Second, I would like to extend a special note of gratitude to Joseph Salmons. If I ever have a question— about pretty much anything—Joe is always the first person I turn to. His collegiality, friendship, and support over the years have been greatly appreciated. I am also very happy to acknowledge again the support provided to the JGL at the University of Calgary. I am particularly grateful to two individuals: Stephen Randall, former Dean of Social Sciences, for his long-term commitment to contribute funding for the Editorial and Production Assistant, and Nicholas ekulin, Director of the Language Research Centre, for providing office and computer support for the production of the JGL. © Society of Germanic Linguistics
168 Murray’s Musings *** I should also note in these pages that the JGL’s contract with Cambridge University Press was renewed for another five years (effective January 2006). It is a great pleasure working with the Cambridge crew, particularly Jonathan Geffner and Robert Dreesen (and formerly, Mark Zadrozny), and I am very pleased with the mutual benefits that this publishing arrangement brings. The good news for authors is that they continue to receive twenty-five offprints free of charge, and an author also has the right to post a final PDF copy of his or her article on a personal web page. In addition, Cambridge University Press has recently made an agreement with the electronic archiving initiative called Portico (http://www.portico.org/), which allows for the availability of all back volumes of Cambridge journals, even in the unlikely event, for example, that Cambridge can no longer provide access. *** As part of my JGL editorial duties, I attend the informal Editor’s Circle held each year at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. This meeting, chaired by Brian Joseph, editor of Language, is usually attended by a dozen or so editors representing various linguistics journals. At the past meeting in Anaheim (January 2007), a draft version of a Linguistics Style Sheet was approved, with the goal of moving toward a common set of conventions for all linguistics journals. The final version, which the JGL will adopt, is posted on the Linguist List (available at http://www.linglist.org/pubs/tocs/index.html/). In fact, in the case of the JGL, the changes are so minor that they will probably go unnoticed by most readers. The new Style Sheet is very close to Language style, which the JGL already follows in all major respects. A policy we definitely will continue—as prescribed by the new Style Sheet as well—is to use full first names for cited authors and editors (rather than only initials), and to use complete names for each bibliographic reference (rather than using a line ______ for repeated instances of an author’s or editor’s name). These two points are crucial for electronic searching, and as the new Style Sheet states: “Each citation should be internally complete.” Our sincere thanks goes to Joseph Salmons, whose efforts were instrumental in securing a consensus on the common Style Sheet.
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Speaking of issues of style, there are advantages to maintaining a single language standard throughout the pages of a journal, and in my role of editor of the JGL I have made a valiant effort to follow Mark Louden’s lead in maintaining high standards of American English. However, I am afraid here that the inbred Canadian tolerance and blissful willingness to live in hybrid systems is only a curse. Of course, the proper way to spell tyre is tire, but it is simply barbaric to spell cheque as check. I find recognise (as opposed to recognize) mildly annoying, but at the same time much prefer colour, centre even though color, center cause me no real concern or irritation. On this note, though, I do have a confession—I will never be comfortable with the impossible that/which distinction of “polished American prose” (Chicago Manual of Style, §5.202). Nevertheless, although I would much prefer to rely on my own intuitions, we do our best to maintain the high standards we have inherited, and trust that our readers will take the occasional mixture of recognizable Canadianisms as a bit of added spice. University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Journal of Germanic Linguistics 19.2 (2007):85–114
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Hesitation Markers in English, German, and Dutch Esther de Leeuw Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh This study reports on a number of highly significant differences found between English, German, and Dutch hesitation markers. English and German native speakers used significantly more vocalic-nasal hesitation markers than Dutch native speakers, who used predominantly vocalic hesitation markers. English hesitation markers occurred most frequently when preceded by silence and followed by a lexical item, or when surrounded by silence. German and Dutch hesitation markers occurred most frequently surrounded by lexical items. In Dutch, vocalic-nasal hesitation markers dominated only when surrounded by silence. Vocalic-nasal hesitation markers dominated in all positions in English and German, although in the former language this was more salient than in the latter. Nasal hesitation markers were used significantly more frequently in German than in English or Dutch. In addition to overall language trends, speaker-specific differences, especially within German and Dutch, were observed. These results raise questions in terms of the symptom versus signal hypotheses regarding the function of hesitation markers.*
1. The Function of Hesitation Markers. At present, there is no uncontested theory about the function of hesitation markers (Künzel 1997:51–52), although some theories center around their pragmatic or social function in discourse (Maclay and Osgood 1959). For example, Maclay and Osgood (1959:42) attributed hesitation markers partly to the speaker’s desire to keep his or her turn of speech. If the speaker’s silent pause is too long, the chance that the listener will *
I am indebted to Angelika Braun and Jens-Peter Köster for their supervision at the University of Trier. I am also thankful to Monika Schmid and Wim Peeters in the Netherlands and to Eva Gossner in England for their organizational help. Finally, I am very grateful to the participants, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. All inadequacies in this article remain my responsibility. © Society for Germanic Linguistics
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interrupt increases. Accordingly, hesitation markers are used to communicate that the turn of speech has not yet been completed (Maclay and Osgood 1959:24). At the same time, the fact that hesitation markers are very common in monologues—such as university lectures, where there is usually no possibility of interruption—seems to contradict this hypothesis (Schachter et al. 1991). However, according to Künzel (1997:58), in “telephone speech” the relative number of hesitation markers increase at the expense of silent pauses. He suggested that this may be due to the fact that when communicating via telephone, the speaker must orally signal to an invisible listener that he or she is not yet finished speaking, whereas in a face-to-face conversation this intention can be communicated visually (p. 59). Alternatively, Clark and Fox Tree (2002:90) point out that in some situations, hesitation markers may actually be used to indicate the speaker’s willingness to give up his or her turn of speech. For example, if the speaker suspects that the listener may know a specific word that the speaker has momentarily forgotten, Clark and Fox Tree claim that a hesitation marker may be inserted to invite the listener to complete the utterance. Because these functions contradict one another, they argue that the mentioned pragmatic functions of hesitation markers “cannot both be basic meanings,” but rather implicatures in addition to their actual meaning (pp. 90–91). Other researchers have attributed the function of hesitation markers to cognitive processes on the part of the speaker. This explanation can be broadly termed the SYMPTOM HYPOTHESIS, which contrasts with the SIGNAL HYPOTHESIS. In particular, the symptomatic explanation of hesitation markers has received general acceptance. Even the terms “hesitation marker,” and for that matter its synonym “filled pause,” imply that these utterances are symptomatic of some sort of cognitive process on the part of the speaker. For example, Goldman-Eisler (1968:26) proposed a general theory of hesitation markers, according to which they may be regarded as an indication of “some central planning process.” Maclay and Osgood (1959) theorized that the function of hesitation markers is to create time for verbal planning in speech, like the unfilled pause. Crystal (1992:170) states that hesitation markers may indicate “the speaker is thinking about what to say next,” and may express “doubt or uncertainty.” Rochester (1973) hypothesized that hesitation markers are indications of time for the speech production apparatus to search for the next word, phrase, or idea. Christenfeld (1994) and Schachter et al. (1991) found that hesitation markers occur
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when a speaker is faced with an option or a challenging choice. In conjunction with this, Reynolds and Paivio (1968) found that pauses, both silent and hesitation markers, were more frequent in the case of abstract rather than concrete nouns. Siegman and Pope’s (1966) findings showed that subjects used more hesitation markers when they described ambiguous occurrences. Shriberg (1994) found that vocalic and vocalicnasal hesitation markers showed systematic differences in sentence positioning in American English, with vocalic-nasals being more typical for initial position. In her view, vocalic-nasal hesitation markers were “used relatively more often during planning of larger units, and uh may be relatively more likely to reflect local lexical decision-making” (p. 154). Many researchers agree that hesitation markers indicate “time out” while the speaker searches for the next word or phrase (Schachter et al. 1991). This symptomatic interpretation of hesitation markers, which reflects cognitive processes on the part of the speaker, has more recently come into question, and the perceptual function for the listener has received more attention (the signal hypothesis). Swerts et al. (1996:1033) observed that “most investigations of speech errors are speaker oriented,” and argued that hesitation markers can be “highly relevant perceptually.” They suggested from their results, which showed that in Dutch major discourse boundaries are more likely to co-occur with hesitation markers than weaker ones, that listeners “may profit from FPs [filled pauses] that point towards major changes in topics” (p. 1034). In their study, they defined major discourse boundaries as breaks in “larger-scale discourse units (‘paragraphs,’ ‘topical units’)” (p. 1035). Their study additionally showed that vocalic-nasal hesitation markers are used more frequently at major discourse boundaries in Dutch and that these are more likely to be surrounded by silent pauses on both sides (p. 1035). Furthermore, they found that filled pauses after stronger breaks are longer in duration and higher in frequency than those after weaker boundaries, “but this effect is due to the filled pauses in phrase-initial position” (p. 1035). Summing up, Swerts et al. claimed that “filled pauses [in Dutch] at the onset of major discourse units are prosodically different from those in other positions,” and suggested that these differences in hesitation markers among Dutch “may reflect different planning processes, but they could also be different rhetorical devices that are explicitly controlled by the speaker to signal something to a communication partner” (p. 1035).
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Related to this, Fox Tree (2001) found that in American English hesitation markers helped listeners recognize an upcoming target word faster, thereby implying that they presignal upcoming linguistic material for the listener. She also found that in American English, overhearers of a conversation interpret speakers differently, depending on whether they respond to their interlocutor immediately; pause and respond; say um and respond; or say um, pause, and then respond (Fox Tree 2002:37). Accordingly, Clark and Fox Tree (2002:75) criticized the term “filled pause,” because “the unstated assumption is that they are pauses (not words) that are filled with sound (not silence).” They found this term misleading and suggested the neutral term “filler.” Like Shriberg (1994) and Swerts et al. (1996), Clark and Fox Tree (2002:80) associated vocalic hesitation markers with minor delays in speech and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers with major delays, claiming “uh and um contrast in basic meanings.” However, Clark and Fox Tree emphasized the fact that the delays associated with hesitation markers do not have to reflect syntactic planning, as they are also used in front of single word answers. Contrary to most other researchers, Clark and Fox Tree (2002:80) viewed hesitation markers as being “under the speaker’s control.” Whereas other studies assume speaker passivity in the use of hesitation markers, which are seen as symptomatic of the speaker’s cognitive processes, Clark and Fox Tree argue for the signaling effect of hesitation markers—speakers “use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh) or major (um) delay in speaking” (p. 73). More recently, the signal hypothesis has been criticized in O’Connell and Kowal 2005:555, whose results indicate that “uh and um cannot serve as signals for upcoming delay, let alone signal it differentially.” Due to their location, the prediction that both vocalic and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers signal a delay would be wrong 76% of the time (O’Connell and Kowal 2005:567). Rather, in their view, the meaning of both hesitation markers is dependent upon the preceding and following verbal context. The fact that hesitation markers may be associated with specific functions in discourse—whether to convey a message to a listener or to reflect inner cognitive processes on the part of the speaker—is of relevance for the present crosslinguistic study.
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2. Language Specificity of Hesitation Markers. Most researchers agree that the realization of hesitation markers is language specific (Maclay and Osgood 1959; Levelt 1983; Baldwin and French 1990; Künzel 1997; Clark and Fox Tree 2002). However, it is not clear what causes this language specificity. Unfortunately, there are no empirical crosslinguistic studies of hesitation markers and observed differences in languages tend to be impressionistic. In their general description, Baldwin and French (1990:53) observed that realizations occurring within Received Pronunciation range from “front, central, and back monophthongs with varying degrees of openness […] to opening, closing, and centering diphthongs.” According to their observations, these variants can occur with or without a bilabial nasal. Lickley (1994) found for six British English speakers that vocalicnasals were more common than vocalic hesitation markers in informal conversation. Shriberg (1994:155) suggests that this “may indicate a dialectal difference between British and American English in usage of the two filled-pause forms,” as she found more vocalic hesitation markers than vocalic-nasals in American English.1 A study pertaining to the acoustic qualities of English hesitation markers by Foulkes et al. (2003) found—for females, middle class, and younger speakers of British English—that hesitation markers with a bilabial nasal [m] after the vocalic portion occurred significantly more often than hesitation markers composed solely of a vocalic element. As indicated by Künzel’s (1987:37) observations, German hesitation markers differ in their vocalic quality, which can range from an unrounded, open back vowel to a central schwa. The vocalic element may be preceded by a glottal stop and followed by the bilabial nasal [m], and in many cases the vocalic element is nasalized. According to Künzel (1987:37, 1997:51), these possibilities are speaker-specific, and can be used for speaker identification in the case of German since individuals tend to be consistent in using “their” personal variant. Swerts et al. (1996:1033) found that hesitation markers composed solely of a vocalic element were more common in Dutch than those 1
Hence, similarities found between American English and Dutch regarding the listener’s increased ability to recognize words in upcoming speech upon hearing a vocalic hesitation marker (Fox Tree 2001) may not necessarily apply to British English speakers.
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consisting of a vocalic and nasal element. Van Donzel et al. (1996:1029) reported that the use of vocalic hesitation markers directly after words with no period of silence between the word and hesitation marker (that is, clitics; Clark and Fox Tree 2002:73) is a common pausing device in Dutch. As already stated, Swerts et al. (1996:1035) found that in Dutch, vocalic-nasal hesitation markers were used more frequently at major discourse boundaries and that these hesitation markers were more likely to have silent pauses on both sides. In summary, previous language-specific studies of hesitation markers in British English, German, and Dutch have generally concluded that (a) in British English, vocalic-nasal hesitation markers are most commonly used; (b) in German, there is a degree of speaker-specificity regarding vocalic and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers—some speakers use more vocalic hesitation markers, others more vocalic-nasals; and (c) in Dutch, vocalic hesitation markers are most commonly used. By comparing hesitation markers in English, German, and Dutch, the present study, as outlined below, not only sheds light on potential language-specific characteristics of hesitation markers, it also raises questions regarding the symptom and signal hypotheses. 3. Methods. The hesitation markers of 16 English, 21 German, and 23 Dutch native speakers were compared to determine potential differences in their realization and usage. The first recordings were made at the University of Bristol in a quiet room. The second group of recordings was conducted at the University of Trier in a sound proof room. Finally, the last recordings were made in quiet rooms at the Free University of Amsterdam and at the University of Utrecht. 3.1. Participants. Subjects were similar in terms of their education and social class. They were either undergraduate or postgraduate students within the Faculty of Language at their respective universities. Students were all native speakers with knowledge of the other languages in question, yet their proficiency in these languages varied. The English native speakers were familiar with the German language; the Dutch native speakers varied in their proficiency in both English and German; and the German native speakers varied in their proficiency in the English language. In addition,
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many of the subjects were also familiar with additional languages, such as French and Spanish. Some subjects had spent time abroad, but none had lived abroad. All subjects had acquired their second or third languages in adolescence in a school environment. The age of the subjects ranged from 18 to 30 years. The English students were generally younger than their German and Dutch counterparts, varying in age between 18 and 21 years, with an average age of 20. The Germans ranged in age from 19 to 26, with an average age of 22. The Dutch students were between the ages of 18 and 30, with an average age of 23.2 There was a general dominance of female over male subjects for each language. Of the English speakers, 4 males were recorded and 12 females. Regarding the German subjects, 9 males and 12 females were recorded. Lastly, eight Dutch males and 15 Dutch females were interviewed. Because it has been found that gender can affect disfluency rates (Bortfeld et al. 2001:139), with males generally using more hesitation markers than females in American English, this factor was further investigated, as discussed below. Subjects were considered to be representative speakers of the standard variant of their native language.3 There were no indications of language disorders for any of the participants. 2
Although the German and Dutch speakers tended to be slightly older than their British counterparts, this fact should not jeopardize the quality of the study. In a study by Bortfeld et al. (2001:138)—which investigated, among other factors, the effects of age on disfluency rates in American English conversation—age effects were only found in older speakers (ranging in age from 63 to 72 years). Older speakers overall produced higher disfluency rates than middle-aged (mean age, 47;11) or younger speakers (mean age, 28;10). However, no difference was found between the latter two groups (Bortfeld et al. 2001:138). 3
The respective standard variants were: Received Pronunciation, Standarddeutsch, and Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands. Each speaker was asked to assess the extent to which a regional dialect influenced his or her native language pronunciation on a scale of one to four. Category 4 consists of those who always spoke using their standard variant with no influence of a regional dialect; category 3 subjects spoke a standard variant that could be slightly influenced by a regional dialect; category 2 subjects rarely spoke using the standard variant because their regional dialect was noticeably dominant; and category 1 subjects were completely unable to speak the standard variant, because their regional
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3.2. Procedure. During the recordings, questions were posed with the intention of initiating spontaneous speech and, therefore, also hesitation markers. It was not, however, intended for the interviewees to feel pressured during the conversations, and many of the questions were posed to help the participants feel at ease in an experimental setting in which they did not know the interviewer. Generally, a list of questions, which was drawn up prior to the interview, was followed, and the students were asked to describe their personal experiences and opinions on general topics such as current affairs, education, and hobbies.4 The subjects were told beforehand that it would be preferred if they said as much on the topic as they felt they were able to, and that their answers were not viewed as being either right or wrong. The interviewer interfered minimally with the subjects’ spontaneous monologues, and generally only introduced new topics from the question list when the speaker had no further response. Thus, the interviewer fulfilled more of a prompting function rather than acting as a real interviewer.5 dialect was so dominant. Eighty-five percent of the subjects characterized themselves as belonging to either category 3 or 4. The self-assessment was in all cases similar to the interviewer’s assessment, which was completed with the same categorizational process. Participants who characterized themselves as belonging to either category 1 or 2 remained in the study, and it was observed whether or not their results differed from those who had placed themselves in category 3 or 4. Since no such difference was observed, all participants were included in the study, as the regional dialect in question did not contradict the general trend of each language. It is possible, however, that other regional dialects would have contradicted the trend, or that the subjects of categories 1 and 2 were in fact more representative of their standard variants than the assessment procedure suggested. 4 5
A selection of questions posed during the interviews is found in the Appendix.
The interviewer’s native language was Canadian English (native-like fluency in German and high fluency in Dutch). Although, to the best of my knowledge, no study has shown that second language learners vary their use of hesitation markers in their native language when speaking with proficient non-native speakers, one could argue that subjects produced hesitation markers differently when speaking to someone with a different native language from their own, even if the non-native speaker did fulfill more of a prompting function. Similarly, one could also argue that British English speakers might change their
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All recordings were conducted using a Sony DAT recorder (TCDD100). The condenser microphone (Sony ECM-MS907) was placed at a distance of approximately 30 cm from the subject. The average interview duration was five minutes and 21 seconds. Actual speaking time was not strictly monitored in order to keep speech production natural and to avoid artefacts such as accelerating or slowing down speech in view of a time limit. The recorded interviews were digitally transferred from the digital audiocassettes to the hard disk of a Windows-based PC system, with no alteration of sampling rate and resolution. They were then edited using the software package Cool Edit Pro and analyzed using Multi-Speech, a Windows-based speech analysis program produced by KAY Elemetrics. Hesitation markers were located in the total recordings. The process of locating hesitation markers was based primarily on linguistic intuition, as well as on the functional characteristics of hesitation markers (Maclay and Osgood 1959; Rochester 1973; Christenfeld 1994; Schachter et al. 1991; Clark and Fox Tree 2002), and on speaker-specific hesitation marker characteristics (Künzel 1997:51). This process created a corpus of 1,928 hesitation markers, each speaker having his or her individual corpus with a different amount of hesitation markers depending on how often he or she hesitated. These hesitation markers were then analyzed in each language according to four different parameters: (a) number of hesitation markers per minute (hmr); (b) proportion of vocalic, vocalicnasal, and nasal hesitation markers; (c) positioning of hesitation markers within spontaneous speech; and (d) positioning of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers within spontaneous speech. The results from all three languages were then compared. 3.3. Determining Number of Hesitation Markers per Minute (hmr). The frequency of hesitation markers was defined as the number of hesitation markers in the subject’s speech divided by his or her speaking
hesitation markers when speaking to a native Canadian English speaker. In fact, hesitation markers are generally assumed to be quite consistent in an individual’s speech, and thus may be used in forensic phonetics to identify speakers partly due to the fact that they are likely to be transferred from the native language into the foreign language and not the other way around (Künzel 1997:51; Baldwin and French 1990).
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time. Speaking time was attained by subtracting the time the interviewer spoke and sections of silence greater than 2s from the total duration of the interview. The speaking time was measured in minutes, and consequently the frequency of hesitation markers was expressed as the number of hesitation markers per minute (hmr). Subjects’ individual hmr’s were then averaged and the mean hmr for English, German, and Dutch was obtained. The standard deviation and the maximum and minimum hmr within each language were also derived, and the statistical significance was then tested.6 Also, as mentioned, because Bortfeld et al. (2001:139–140) observed in their corpus of American English speakers that males tended to use more hesitation markers than females, it was tested whether hmr was influenced by gender in the individual languages. 3.4. Determining Vocalic, Vocalic-Nasal, and Nasal Proportions. Three types of hesitation marker were distinguished: those composed solely of a vocalic element (v), those composed of a vocalic element followed by the bilabial nasal element (vn), and those composed only of a bilabial nasal element (n). Thus, the present research differs from previous studies, which focus on vocalic and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers (Fox Tree and Clark 2002; O’Connell and Kowan 2005; Swerts et al 1996; Bortfeld et al. 2002; Shriberg 1996). The percentage of each type of hesitation marker relative to each subject’s individual total number of hesitation markers was calculated and the proportion of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers was attained for each subject. The individual values of each type of hesitation marker were then averaged overall with the other speakers for each language. These language-specific results were then statistically compared with those of the other languages. Finally, based on these initial findings, it was investigated whether there was a correlation between hmr and the percentage of vocalic hesitation markers in each language. 3.5. Determining Positioning of Hesitation Markers. Four positions were differentiated: (a) hesitation markers surrounded by silence (ss positioning); (b) hesitation markers surrounded by words (ww 6
Level of significance was set at 5%.
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positioning); (c) hesitation markers preceded by silence and followed by a word (sw positioning); and (d) hesitation markers preceded by a word and followed by silence (ws positioning). Silence was defined as any period of silence exceeding one second.7 Non-semantic utterances, such as coughing and yawning, were interpreted as silence.8 All lexemes were recognized as being words even when they were incomplete. These categories largely resembled those described by O’Connell and Kowal (2005:567) as embedded (ww), isolated (ss), initial (sw), and final (ws). The percentage of occurrence in each position was calculated relative to the total number of hesitation markers used by that specific subject. These individual percentages were then averaged in English, German, and Dutch, and crosslinguistic differences were tested to determine statistical significance. As a result, it became apparent which position was most common in English, German, and Dutch. Hesitation markers surrounded by silence were seen to be major delays in speech, whereas those surrounded by words, in proximity of less than 1s, were seen to be minor delays in speech. Accordingly, based on differences in duration, it is claimed that ss positioning represented a major break in discourse, whereas ww positioning represented a minor break. It is possible to argue that in extreme cases, hesitation markers of greater duration may have compensated for periods of silence of shorter than 1s. For this reason, the duration of hesitation markers was also
7
The Dutch subjects’ hesitation markers often directly follow words, with no silent pause between word and hesitation marker, as also reported by van Donzel et al. (1996). This occurred less often in English and German. A one second cutoff did not take such clitics (Clark and Fox Tree 2002:73) into consideration. It was not thought that the one second cut-off detracted from the experimental design as it allowed for a crosslinguistic comparison of minor and major delays. However, it may be beneficial in future research to work with a continuous time scale, rather than a categorical one. 8
Smacking, perhaps alveolar and bilabial clicks, were also considered to be silence. Many speakers of English, German, and Dutch consistently used such smacking noises in proximity to their hesitation markers, an observation that deserves further attention.
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measured. The average duration of hesitation markers is shown in table 1.9
Vocalic ()10 Vocalic-Nasal () Nasal ()
English German Dutch 0.379s (0.207s) 0.317s (0.113s) 0.365s (0.166s) 0.493s (0.199s) 0.457s (0.161s) 0.611s (0.243s) 0.330s (0.178s) 0.470s (0.234s) 0.612s (0.262s)
Table 1. Duration of hesitation markers. The data in table 1 indicate that hesitation markers rarely exceeded 1s in duration; hence the total delay of major discourse breaks (ss) was almost always longer than the total delay of minor discourse breaks (ww). In some cases, hesitation markers did exceed 1s in duration. For example, one Dutch female speaker demonstrated an average vocalicnasal hesitation marker duration of 1.019s, and her maximum vocalicnasal hesitation marker duration was 2.048s. When analyzed more closely, it was found that her hesitation markers in excess of 1s were in all cases surrounded by silence exceeding 1s. Other speakers’ hesitation markers of longer duration displayed the same characteristics. 9
An ANOVA test revealed a significant difference with regard to duration between vocalic hesitation markers in English, German, and Dutch (F(2,579)=4.18, p=0.016, 2=1%). A post-hoc Tukey HSD revealed a significant difference between the duration of German and Dutch vocalic hesitation markers, German vocalics being shorter than Dutch. Significant differences with regard to duration between English and Dutch and English and German vocalic hesitation markers were not reported. Another ANOVA test revealed a highly significant difference pertaining to duration of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers (F(2,763)= 32.90, p<0.001, 2=7%). A post-hoc Tukey HSD revealed highly significant differences between the duration of English and Dutch vocalic-nasals and between German and Dutch vocalic-nasals, indicating that Dutch vocalic-nasal hesitation markers were longer than those of English and German. No significant difference was observed with regard to German and English vocalicnasals. Lastly, probably due to lack of nasals, no significant difference was revealed for these hesitation markers either. 10
Sigma denotes the standard deviation; all statistical analyses were calculated using SPSS.
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Categorizing minor and major delays according to the presence or absence of silence surrounding the hesitation marker was based primarily on studies by Swerts et al. (1996) on Dutch and Clark and Fox Tree (2002) on American English. In the former study, it was found that vocalic-nasal hesitation markers were used more frequently at major discourse boundaries, and that these hesitation markers were “more likely to be surrounded by silent pauses on either side” (1996:1035). In the latter study, it was found that “um was followed by delays far more often than uh” (2002:82); “there were also longer pauses on average after um than after uh” (p. 82); “there were more pauses before um than before uh” (p. 84); and “there were longer pauses on average before um than before uh” (p. 84). Swerts et al. (1996) found that hesitation markers surrounded by silence most often occurred in major discourse breaks, while those lacking silence in their proximity most often occurred in minor discourse breaks. 3.6. Determining Relative Positioning. The relative occurrence of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers within each position was calculated. Four different positioning possibilities were distinguished, in which three different types of hesitation markers may have occurred: 1a. 1b. 1c. 2a. 2b. 2c. 3a. 3b. 3c. 4a. 4b. 4c.
vocalic surrounded by silence (svs) vocalic-nasal surrounded by silence (svns) nasal surrounded by silence (sns) vocalic surrounded by words (wvw) vocalic-nasal surrounded by words (wvnw) nasal surrounded by words (wnw) vocalic preceded by silence, followed by a word (svw) vocalic-nasal preceded by silence, followed by a word (svnw) nasal preceded by silence, followed by a word (snw) vocalic preceded by a word, followed by silence (wvs) vocalic-nasal preceded by a word, followed by silence (wvns) nasal preceded by a word, followed by silence (wns)
Each individual proportion was then averaged with the other individual proportions within English, German, and Dutch, and these results were statistically compared across languages.
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4. Results. 4.1. Hmr in English, German, and Dutch. Table 2 shows that Dutch speakers used the most hesitation markers per minute with an hmr of 10.1. English speakers used an average of 8.0 hesitation markers per minute, followed by their German counterparts with an average hmr of 6.3. An ANOVA test revealed a highly significant overall difference between English, German, and Dutch hmr’s (F(2,57)=7.93, p=0.001, 2=19%). A post-hoc Tukey HSD indicated highly significant differences between German and Dutch hmr’s, marginally significant differences between English and Dutch, and no significant difference between English and German.11
11
Although differences in data collection are evident across studies, previous research suggests that English, Dutch, and German have similar articulation rates. Goldman-Eisler (1968) found that English speakers have an articulation rate of between 4.4 and 5.9 syllables per second. In a study by Tauroza and Allison (1990), the average articulation rates in British English vary between 3.16 and 5.33 syllables per second. In Northern Standard Dutch, Blaauw (1995) found that the average articulation rate was 5.2 syllables per second. Verhoeven et al. (2004) found that their Dutch speakers from the Netherlands had an articulation rate of between 4.89 and 5.42 syllables per second. Studies investigating Standard German have suggested similar articulation rates. Dellwo et al. (2003) found that Standard German speakers articulated with an average of 5.6 syllables per second, while their British English speakers in the same study had a mean value of 5.9 syllables per second. Tillmann and Pfitzinger (2003) suggest that, in German, a speech rate of 6.67 syllables per second is fast, and Künzel et al. (1992:49) calculated a mean articulation rate of between 4.4 and 6.0 syllables per second for German. Although previous research suggests that articulation rates in English, German, and Dutch are similar, Laver (1994: 534–546) draws attention to the complications involved with crosslinguistic comparisons of both articulation and speaking rate as a result of structural differences in languages. Due to the facts that (a) previous research suggests similar articulation rates across English, German, and Dutch, and (b) there are numerous problems associated with measuring speed of speech, such measurement was not attempted in the present study (see Pfitzinger 1998, 2001 for a detailed explanation as to why, at least in German, local speech rate is determined by both the phone and the syllable). It is claimed that the results from the previous studies are sufficient within the objectives of this investigation.
Hesitation Markers
English German Dutch
99
Mean hmr of hmr Maximum hmr Minimum hmr 8.0 3.1 15.5 3.2 6.3 2.8 14.9 2.9 10.1 3.5 16.9 3.9 Table 2. Hesitation markers per minute (hmr).
Because the ratio of males to females differed within the three language groups and some research indicating that in American English males tend to use more hesitation markers than females (Bortfeld et al. 2001:139–140), a univariate ANOVA was calculated for hmr with the independent variables of gender and language. Although the language differences were confirmed in the post-hoc test, gender was not a significant effect, and the interaction of gender with language was also not significant. 4.2. Proportion of Vocalic, Vocalic-Nasal, and Nasal Markers. The English and German speakers generally showed a dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers, while the Dutch speakers showed a dominance of vocalic hesitation markers. The German speakers used nasal hesitation markers more frequently than English or Dutch speakers (table 3). An ANOVA test revealed highly significant differences between the proportions of vocalic-nasals in English, German, and Dutch (F(2,57)= 44.46, p<0.001, 2 =59%). A post-hoc Tukey HSD test revealed a marginally significant difference between the proportions of German and English vocalic-nasals and highly significant differences in Dutch versus English and in Dutch versus German, substantiating the observation that Dutch subjects used far fewer vocalic-nasals than did German and English subjects. Another ANOVA test indicated significant differences between the proportions of vocalic hesitation markers in English, German, and Dutch (F(2,57)=46.24, p<0.001, 2=61%). Here, a post-hoc Tukey HSD test revealed highly significant differences between Dutch and English, as well as between Dutch and German. However, there was no significant difference between English and German, substantiating the observation that vocalics were used more often in Dutch than in either German or English.
27
0
13
7
50
Standard Deviation (%)
Minimum (%)
Maximum (%) 98
38
14
72
67
26
9
100
81
13
50
93
63
2
14
27
Table 3. Vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal proportions.
89
27
18
Average (%)
7
0
2
0
43
0
11
7
11
0
3
1
Vocalic Vocalic Vocalic Vocalic- Vocalic- Vocalic- Nasal Nasal Nasal English German Dutch Nasal Nasal Nasal English German Dutch English German Dutch
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In addition, an ANOVA test revealed significant differences between the proportions of nasals in English, German, and Dutch (F(2,57)=4.43, p=0.016, 2=10%). A post-hoc Tukey HSD test indicated significant differences between German and Dutch, and between German and English, but not between English and Dutch, supporting the claim that more nasals were used in German than in either English or Dutch. Of the 20 German subjects, 10 used nasals, and their averaged proportion of nasals was 14%. In contrast, only 6 of 27 Dutch speakers used nasals, and their averaged proportion was 6%. Only one English speaker used nasals, which accounted for 7% of his total hesitation marker usage. Accordingly, Germans who did use nasals did so more often than their English and Dutch counterparts. The tendency for German speakers to use more vocalic-nasal hesitation markers than vocalics was not as consistent as it was for the English speakers, who showed no preference for vocalics. For example, 6% of the hesitation markers used by one German female subject were vocalic and 94% were vocalic-nasal, while three German males showed a clear dominance of vocalic hesitation markers. Their respective vocalic rates were 71%, 89%, and 82%. A highly significant difference was revealed between the proportion of vocalics used by the latter three male subjects and the proportion of vocalics used by the other German speakers (t(2)=6.89, p<0.001, 2=69%). A highly significant difference was also revealed between the proportion of vocalic-nasals used by these three subjects and the proportion of vocalic-nasals used by the other German speakers (t(2)=-5.76, p<0.001, 2=61%). Thus, German native speakers showed more polarity in their use of vocalic and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers than English native speakers. No significant difference was revealed between Dutch native speakers and the three German male speakers with regard to the proportion of both vocalic and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers. There was a higher level of consistency within Dutch native speakers, as opposed to the polarity discussed above within German speakers. However, one Dutch female subject did show a preference for vocalic-nasal hesitation markers with a vocalic-nasal proportion of 63%. It is of interest to note that the German male subject who displayed the highest proportion of vocalic hesitation markers in German speech also had the highest hmr among the German native speakers. Similarly, as previously noted, Dutch speakers on average had a higher hmr than
102 de Leeuw the English and German speakers, and also tended to use more vocalic hesitation markers. Pearson correlations were run in all three language groups to determine whether the percentage of vocalic hesitation markers correlated with hmr. In English and Dutch, the results were not significant, whereas in German a significant positive correlation was revealed (r=0.46, p<0.05), indicating that Germans who used more hesitation markers in their speech did so by using more vocalics rather than vocalic-nasals. 4.3. Positioning of Hesitation Markers. The descriptive analysis revealed that English hesitation markers occurred least frequently in ww positioning, whereas German and Dutch hesitation markers occurred most frequently in this positioning (table 4). An ANOVA test revealed a highly significant difference between ww positioning in English, German, and Dutch (F(2,57)=8.47, p=0.001, 2=20%). A post-hoc Tukey HSD test indicated that this difference was mainly driven by significant differences between English and German ww positioning, as well as between English and Dutch ww positioning. By contrast, no significant difference was detected between German and Dutch ww positioning. Another ANOVA test revealed a highly significant difference between sw positioning in English, German, and Dutch (F(2,57)=8.70, p=0.001, 2 =20%). A post-hoc Tukey HSD indicated that this difference was mainly driven by significant differences between English and German sw positioning, as well as between English and Dutch sw positioning. By contrast, no significant difference was detected between German and Dutch sw positioning. These results confirmed the descriptive analysis in which it was found that English subjects’ hesitation markers were more frequent in sw positioning than German and Dutch hesitation markers. No significant differences were revealed in either ss or ws positioning between English, German, and Dutch subjects. Lastly, it should be noted that the Dutch female speaker who preferred vocalic-nasal hesitation markers over vocalics displayed a slightly higher percentage of ss positioning (25%) and a slightly lower percentage of ww positioning (17%) than the Dutch average. Similarly, of the three German males who displayed an overall preference for vocalic hesitation markers, their percentage of ss positioning was lower
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than the German average at 7%, 6%, and 9%, although their percentage of ww positioning varied at 29%, 17%, and 59%, respectively.
English ss ww sw ws German ss ww sw ws Dutch ss ww sw ws
Average (%)
Standard Deviation (%)
Maximum (%)
Minimum (%)
22 15 43 20
16 12 20 12
53 39 100 40
0 0 18 0
14 32 29 25
16 20 16 16
71 73 69 72
0 0 4 6
15 36 23 26
12 16 9 12
38 65 35 50
0 0 6 0
Table 4. Positioning in English, German, and Dutch. 4.4. Positioning of Vocalic, Vocalic-Nasal, and Nasal Markers. English native speakers showed an obvious dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers in all positions (table 5). This was most salient in ss positioning, in which svns dominated by 97%, and no English speaker preferred any other type of hesitation marker here. In contrast, although vocalic-nasals still dominated, vocalic hesitation markers were most likely to occur in ww and sw positioning. Generally, there was little idiosyncrasy regarding the positioning of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers hesitation markers within the English group. In contrast, German subjects showed more idiosyncrasy and high standard deviations in the positioning of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers. Vocalic-nasal hesitation markers were used most frequently in ss (svns=75%) and ws positioning (wvns=82%) in German.
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English svs svns sns wvw wvnw wnw svw svnw snw wvs wvns wns German svs svns sns wvw wvnw wnw svw svnw snw wvs wvns wns
Average
Stand. Dev.
Maximum
Minimum
3 97 0 16 84 0 25 74 1 12 88 0
6 5 0 16 16 0 19 18 5 16 16 0
17 100 0 50 100 0 73 95 20 53 100 0
0 83 0 0 50 0 0 27 0 0 47 0
6 75 19 42 58 0 27 58 15 17 82 1
14 31 29 28 28 0 35 36 28 30 29 5
50 100 100 100 100 0 100 100 100 100 100 25
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Hesitation Markers
Dutch svs svns sns wvw wvnw wnw svw svnw snw wvs wvns wns
13 84 3 94 6 0 62 36 2 76 24 0
20 24 9 9 9 0 23 22 5 24 24 0
62 100 33 100 27 0 100 100 20 100 78 0
105
0 27 0 73 0 0 0 0 0 22 0 0
Table 5. Positioning of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers (percentages). In ss positioning, the variation of vocalic-nasals and nasals was great (0–100%), rather than a variation between vocalics and vocalic-nasals, as observed in ww positioning. No German subject preferred vocalic hesitation markers in ss positioning. The three German male subjects, whose vocalic to vocalic-nasal ratio was similar to the average Dutch vocalic to vocalic-nasal ratio, generally displayed a preference for vocalic-nasals in ss positioning. At the same time, one of these male speakers exhibited an equal distribution of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers in ss positioning. Nasal hesitation markers occurred most frequently in ss positioning in German, in comparison to the three other positions. Two speakers who displayed an overall preference for vocalic-nasal hesitation markers did not do so in ss positioning, preferring here nasal hesitation markers. Interestingly, both of these speakers exhibited a dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers in ww positioning. In ww positioning, vocalic hesitation markers were most likely to occur in German (wvw=42%; wvn=58%), although the variation between speakers for vocalic and vocalic-nasals in this position was great (0– 100%). The three German males who exhibited an overall dominance of
106 de Leeuw vocalic hesitation markers also did so in ww positioning.12 The idiosyncratic preference for vocalic or vocalic-nasal hesitation marker in ww positioning was clear in the rest of the German group; hence, the population exhibited an overall preference for vocalic-nasals. Among this population, nine speakers preferred vocalic-nasals, and two of these speakers only used vocalic-nasals in ww positioning.13 By contrast, two others, in addition to the three German males, clearly preferred vocalic hesitation markers in ww positioning. Four other German speakers showed an equal distribution of vocalic and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers in ww positioning. Six speakers within the German population who showed an overall dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers did so in both ww and ss positioning. The overall dominance of vocalic-nasals in ss positioning in English and German was similarly displayed in Dutch. In Dutch, vocalic-nasal hesitation markers dominated ss positioning by 84%. By contrast, the proportion of vocalic hesitation markers in this position was only 13%. This was the exception because in other positions, vocalic hesitation markers dominated in Dutch. It should be noted, however, that, as in German, the range of vocalic-nasals in ss positioning for Dutch was somewhat idiosyncratic (27–100%), indicating that some Dutch speakers displayed high levels of vocalic hesitation markers in ss positioning.14 In ww positioning, vocalics dominated by 94% in Dutch, and the standard deviation here was low. Only one Dutch female speaker showed an overall dominance of vocalic-nasals; yet in ww positioning, she displayed a dominance of vocalics, and in ss positioning an expected dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers. 12
Their relative percentages of vocalic hesitation markers in ww positioning were 75%, 100%, and 90%.
13
As stated above, two speakers showed an overall preference for nasal hesitation markers in ss positioning, with the relative percentages of these markers being 67% and 100%. Both of these subjects preferred vocalic-nasals in ww positioning, and their relative percentages of vocalic-nasals for this position were 100% and 88%. The other speaker who only used vocalic-nasal hesitation markers in ww positioning did not exhibit any hesitation markers in ss positioning.
14
Those Dutch speakers who used vocalics in ss positioning did so with relative percentages of 62%, 17%, 36%, 17%, 45%, 50%, 14%, and 25%.
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5. Discussion. 5.1. Hmr in English, German, and Dutch. The results regarding hmr in English, German, and Dutch indicate that hesitation markers display language-specific characteristics (table 2). Dutch speakers used significantly more hesitation markers than speakers of the other languages. It was also found that gender did not have a significant effect on hmr for any of the languages. 5.2. Proportion of Vocalic, Vocalic-Nasal, and Nasal Markers. The results regarding proportion of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers in English, German, and Dutch indicate that hesitation markers display language specific characteristics (table 3). The fact that vocalics dominated in Dutch is consistent with the results of Swerts et al.’s (1996) study of Dutch, which found that vocalic-nasal hesitation markers occurred less frequently than vocalic hesitation markers. The results additionally support Lickley’s 1994 study, which found for six British English speakers that vocalic-nasals were more common in informal conversation. Moreover, language-specificity was indicated by the observation that nasal hesitation markers were used significantly more often in German than in either English or Dutch. Ten German subjects used nasals, and of these the averaged proportion of nasals was 14%. By contrast, only six Dutch native speakers used nasals, and only one English native speaker used nasals, all minimally. In addition to language-specific tendencies, differences between speakers within each language were also observed. Most Germans showed an obvious dominance of vocalic-nasals over vocalics. However, for three male German subjects, this ratio was reversed—they displayed a dominance of vocalics, as did the Dutch. Interestingly, their percentage of ss positioning was half that of the German average. Similarly, it was noticeable that the one Dutch female who showed a preference for vocalic-nasal hesitation markers also used an above average percentage of ss positioning. Such results suggest that although these speakers went against their language trend in preference for either vocalics in Dutch and vocalic-nasals in German, this may have been due to a greater relative usage of ss positioning for the Dutch speaker and a lesser relative use of ss positioning for the German speakers. When the languages were observed separately, only German showed a positive correlation between high hmr and preference for vocalic
108 de Leeuw hesitation markers. It is possible that a correlation could exist in English and Dutch as well, but that the number of subjects in the present study was not large enough to reveal such a correlation, given that both the English and Dutch speakers were more consistent in their preference for specific hesitation markers. 5.3. Positioning of Hesitation Markers. Highly significant differences were also displayed with regard to the positioning of hesitation markers in sw and ww positioning. English hesitation markers occurred least frequently in ww positioning, whereas German and Dutch hesitation markers occurred most frequently in ww positioning. If it is assumed that hesitation markers in ww positioning are representative of minor discourse breaks—as suggested by both Swerts et al. (1996) and Clark and Fox Tree (2002) (also Fox Tree 2001)—it is conspicuous that the English speakers in this study structured their speech with fewer minor discourse breaks than the German and Dutch speakers. 5.4. Positioning of Vocalic, Vocalic-Nasal, and Nasal Markers. The results regarding the positioning of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers in English, German, and Dutch indicate that hesitation markers display language-specific characteristics (table 5). English native speakers showed an obvious dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers in all positions. This was most salient in ss positioning, in which svns dominated by 97%. In contrast, although vocalic-nasals still dominated, vocalic hesitation markers were most likely to occur in sw and ww positioning. In Dutch, vocalic-nasal hesitation markers dominated similarly in ss positioning by 84%, and the proportion of vocalic hesitation markers in this positioning was only 13%. This was an exception because in other positions vocalic hesitation markers dominated in Dutch. In ww positioning, vocalics dominated by 94% in Dutch and the standard deviation here was low. Only one Dutch speaker showed an overall dominance of vocalic-nasals, yet in ww positioning she displayed a dominance of vocalics. In German, nasal hesitation markers occurred not only most frequently in ss positioning, they also occurred in higher percentages than in either English or Dutch. In addition to language-specific differences in the positioning of vocalic, vocalic-nasal, and nasal hesitation markers in English, German,
Hesitation Markers
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and Dutch, differences across speakers in each language were also observed. For example, a number of Dutch speakers showed high percentages of vocalic hesitation markers in ss positioning—one speaker even a dominance—although the language trend was to use vocalic-nasal hesitation markers in this position. Moreover, the idiosyncrasy between German speakers for vocalic and vocalic-nasals in ww positioning was great. Although the three German males who exhibited an overall dominance of vocalic hesitation markers also did so expectantly in these minor breaks, idiosyncrasy of preference for vocalic or vocalic-nasal hesitation markers in ww positioning was observed in the rest of the German group—hence, the population exhibited an overall preference for vocalic-nasals. Within this group, nine speakers preferred vocalic-nasals, and two of these speakers only used vocalic-nasals in ww positioning. By contrast, two other German speakers, in addition to the three German males already mentioned, displayed a dominance of vocalic hesitation markers in ww positioning. Other speakers displayed no preference between vocalic and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers in ww positioning. Six speakers within the German group, who showed an overall dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers, did so in both ww and ss positioning. Such idiosyncrasies within the German and Dutch groups challenge the idea that hesitation markers solely function to signal delay—or, more specifically, vocalic-nasals a major delay and vocalics a minor delay—to a listener (Fox Tree 2002). Moreover, the fact that the English native speakers in the present study showed an overall preference for vocalicnasals in all positions does not support the idea that such hesitation markers signal a major delay in British English, as is suggested for American English by Clark and Fox Tree (2002). Future research on other properties of hesitation markers, such as fundamental frequency, or perhaps on the properties investigated in the present study, but applying a more precise technique, may well reveal syntactic, lexical, or pragmatic patterns within these languages not discovered here. 6. Conclusion. The crosslinguistic comparison of hesitation markers revealed statistically significant differences between English, German, and Dutch. These results indicate language-specific trends regarding hesitation
110 de Leeuw markers in the observed languages. However, the fact that some individual subjects within each language group did not conform to these trends raises questions about the function of hesitation markers. If hesitation markers have a signaling effect, as proposed by Clark and Fox Tree (2002), the results of the present study may have interesting consequences. Due to the fact that English speakers display a dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers and Dutch speakers a dominance of vocalic hesitation markers, the use of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers to signal a major delay in English—if this is the case at all—must have had a less significant effect on the listener than in Dutch. Similarly, the use of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers to signal a major break in discourse on the part of the three German male speakers who showed an overall dominance of vocalic hesitation markers would have a greater signaling effect to indicate a major discourse break than if used by the other German native speakers who showed an overall preference for vocalic-nasal hesitation markers. The British English speakers and the majority of the German speakers in the present study who displayed a dominance of vocalic-nasal hesitation markers may have used other phonetic cues to signal major and minor discourse breaks to the listener, which were not analyzed in this study. However, it is conspicuous that if vocalic and vocalic-nasal hesitation markers are in fact words, the former signaling a minor and the latter a major discourse break (Clark and Fox Tree 2002), they do not behave similarly in both American and British English. It is possible that hesitation markers have a signaling function for the listener, but are also a symptom of cognitive processes on the part of the speaker. This interpretation would explain results from various studies, which on the surface appear to be conflicting. For example, four observations have been seen as evidence that hesitation markers are symptoms of the speaker’s cognitive processes: (a) hesitation markers are used in monologues (Schachter et al. 1991), (b) they are used more frequently in the case of abstract rather than concrete nouns (Reynolds and Paivio 1968), (c) more hesitation markers are used when subjects describe ambiguous occurrences (Siegman and Pope 1966), and (d) hesitation markers are more often followed immediately by a word than by silence (O’Connell and Kowal 2005). If hesitation markers have both a symptomatic and a signaling effect, this may explain why they can be used pragmatically to both keep and cede the floor (Maclay and Osgood
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1959:42; Clark and Fox Tree 2002:90)—perhaps dependent upon the content of the surrounding conversation (O’Connell and Kowal 2005: 572). If the listener interprets hesitation markers to symbolize cognitive processes on the part of the speaker, the former may react differently, depending on the context and the interpreted difficulty of the cognitive process. The present findings do not solve the “symptom versus signal” debate. On the one hand, the overall language-specificity of hesitation markers, as well as the fact that they are uttered at all, supports the signal hypothesis. Speakers seem to be communicating information to their interlocutor within the norms of their language (Clark and Fox Tree 2002). On the other hand, idiosyncratic differences within the German group in particular, and also within the Dutch, do not support the signal hypothesis. If hesitation markers function solely as words, why would speakers within German and Dutch divide themselves into different subgroups regarding their preferences for these words in similar situations? Moreover, how does one explain a lack of difference between hesitation markers in minor and major positioning in the case of the British English subjects? This type of crosslinguistic research opens a number of avenues for investigating both the symptom and signal hypotheses of hesitation markers. Future research on further properties of hesitation markers may well deliver answers to these questions.
APPENDIX Selection of Questions Posed English speakers. 1. How would you describe the British culture to foreigners? 2. How would you advertise the area in and around Bristol in a travel guide? 3. Is it advantageous or disadvantageous to accept the Euro in Britain? Why and how would it impact British culture if at all? 4. Describe the last holiday you went on. Where was it, and what did you like or dislike most about it? 5. How do you think the Iraq war will end, and how will it come to this?
112 de Leeuw German speakers. 1. Kannst du die Gegend/Stadt, wo du herkommst, mit Trier vergleichen? 2. Kannst du beschreiben, was du in Trier am Wochenende machst? 3. Kannst du die englische Kultur mit der amerikanischen Kultur vergleichen? Wie nehmen Deutsche diese verschiedenen Kulturen im Vergleich mit der eigenen wahr ? 4. Die SPD-Regierung überlegt, Elitehochschulen in Deutschland zu etablieren. Findest du diesen Vorschlag gut oder schlecht? Warum? 5. Was für einen Ausgang wird der Irakkrieg haben und wie wird es dazu kommen deiner Meinung nach? Dutch speakers. 1. Woon je in Amsterdam/Utrecht, of studeer je alleen hier? Wil je een beetje over Amsterdam/Utrecht vertellen? Bevalt het je of niet en waarom? 2. Kun je de relatie tussen Nederland en België uitleggen? Wat zijn de verschillen tussen België en Nederland? 3. Wat is voor jou belangrijk om een goede studietijd te hebben? 4. Kun je beschrijven hoe je een volmaakt weekend zou hebben? Wat voor leuke dingen ga je doen of niet doen? 5. Nederlanders zijn er vaak trots op, dat hun land heel tolerant is. Bijvoorbeeld zijn prostitutie en softdrugs toegestaan. Vind je het goed of slecht dat in Nederland meer toegestaan wordt dan in andere landen ter wereld?
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Donzel, Monique E. van, and Florien J. Koopmans-van Beinum. 1996. Pausing strategies in discourse in Dutch. Proceedings of the fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, vol. 2, 1029–1032. Philadelphia, PA: IEEE Press. Foulkes, Paul, Gareth Carrol, and Samantha Hughes. 2003. Sociolinguistic and acoustic variability in filled pauses. Paper presented at the annual Conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics. Vienna. Fox Tree, Jean E. 1993. Comprehension after speech disfluencies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. Fox Tree, Jean E. 2001. Listener’s uses of um and uh in speech comprehension. Memory and Cognition 29.320–326. Fox Tree, Jean E. 2002. Interpreting pauses and ums at turn-exchanges. Discourse Processes 34.37–55. Goldman-Eisler, Frieda. 1968. Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech. London: Academic Press. Künzel, Hermann J. 1987. Sprechererkennung—Grundzüge forensischer Sprachverarbeitung. Heidelberg: Kriminalistik Verlag. Künzel, Hermann J., Angelika Braun, and Ulrich Eysholdt. 1992. Einfluss von Alkohol auf Stimme und Sprache. Heidelberg: Kriminalistik Verlag. Künzel, Hermann J. 1997. Some general phonetic and forensic aspects of speaking tempo. Forensic Linguistics 4.48–83. Laver, John. 1994. Principles of phonetics. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levelt, Willem J. M. 1983. Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cognition 14.41–104. Lickley, Robin J. 1994. Detecting disfluency in spontaneous speech. Doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Maclay, Howard, and Charles E. Osgood. 1959. Hesitation phenomena in spontaneous English speech. Word 15.19–44. O’Connell, Daniel C., and Sabine Kowal. 2005. Uh and um revisited: Are they interjections for signaling delay? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34.555–576. Pfitzinger, Hartmut R. 1998. Local speech rate as a combination of syllable and phone rate. Proceedings of the fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ed. by Robert H. Mannell and Jordi Robert-Ribes, 1087–1090. Sydney: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association, Incorporated (ASSTA). Pfitzinger, Hartmut R. 2001. Phonetische Analyse der Sprechgeschwindigkeit. Forschungsberichte des Instituts für Phonetik und Sprachliche Kommunikation der Universität München 38.117–264.
114 de Leeuw Reynolds, Allan, and Allan Paivio. 1968. Cognitive and emotional determinants of speech. Canadian Journal of Psychology 22.164–175. Rochester, Sherry R. 1973. The significance of pauses in spontaneous speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2.51–81. Schachter, Stanley, Nicholas Christenfeld, Bernard Ravina, and Frances Bilous. 1991. Speech disfluency and the structure of knowledge. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60.362–367. Shriberg, Elizabeth. 1994. Preliminaries to a theory of speech disfluencies. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Shriberg, Elizabeth. 2001. To “err” is human: Ecology and acoustics of speech disfluencies. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31.153–169. Siegman, Aron Wolfe, and Benjamin Pope. 1966. Ambiguity and verbal fluency in the TAT. Journal of Consulting Psychology 30.239–245. Swerts, Marc, Anne Wichmann, and Robbert-Jan Beun. 1996. Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, vol. 2, 1033–1036. Philadelphia: IEEE Press. Tauroza, Steve, and Desmond Allison. 1990. Speech rates in British English. Applied Linguistics 11.90–105. Verhoeven, Jo, Guy De Pauw, and Hanne Kloots. 2004. Speech rate in a pluricentric language: A comparison between Dutch in Belgium and the Netherlands. Language and Speech 47.297–308.
Speech Science Research Centre Queen Margaret University Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences Clerwood Terrace, Edinburgh EH12 8TS United Kingdom [[email protected]]
